Skype Slowly Restores Service To Users 76
CWmike writes "Skype continues to slowly recover after an outage caused by problems with its peer-to-peer interconnection system. The latest estimates say that 10 million users are now online, according to a blog post. Skype's outage began on Wednesday."
Re:POTS vs VOIP (Score:1, Informative)
How long ago did you work? Currently all POTS calls *are* VOIP calls!
Re:POTS vs VOIP (Score:2, Informative)
Not Yet, There are still tons of TDM trunks and GR303 based pots lines in service and will be for a long time. But yes your point it correct that you may be using voip whether you know it or not.
PSTN vs independent VoIP (Score:5, Informative)
Currently all POTS calls *are* VOIP calls!
Good gods, how did *that* get modded "Informative"? (Yah, yah, pretend I'm new here.)
POTS calls, by definition, start on a line with Plain Old Telephone Service. 48 volts, analog, more or less the same thing that's been in use for roughly a century now.
Now, once you get to the CO, you're almost certainly going to go digital. That digital channel is still commonly pure TDM and circuit-switched (especially if you don't leave the exchange). You have a 64 Kbit/sec timeslice dedicated to your call all the way. Or it may go into an ATM network ("A technology that lets telephone companies turn your WAN problems into something they can tariff") and be cell-switched. Or, yes, it may go into a packet-switched IP network. Maybe even the Internet, if you're using a cheap LD carrier.
But "all"?? No. Not by a long shot.
Even if your call *does* go VoIP, you may still never leave the domain of the PSTN, where things like QoS can be enforced end-to-end. The Internet's generally a "unreliable, best effort" service. Different operators do different things, and all you can do is plug in somewhere and hope for the best. A telco deploying VoIP as a backhaul internally is a very different beast.