[138179] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leigh Porter)
Mon Feb 28 18:37:37 2011
From: Leigh Porter <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com>
In-Reply-To: <12254284.370.1298934926996.JavaMail.root@benjamin.baylink.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:28:49 +0000
To: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 28 Feb 2011, at 23:15, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Joe Greco" <jgreco@ns.sol.net>
>=20
>> With end-to-end digital, you can have reliable call supervision and
>> status, OOB Caller-ID delivery, crystal clear call quality, probably
>> the ability to handle multiple calls intelligently, no hook race
>> conditions, etc.
>>=20
>> When you throw that one stupid and pointless analog hop in there, you
>> are suddenly limited and broken in so many ways.
>=20
> Sure.
>=20
> But I don't think it's the analog hop that people are really concerned
> about *per se*... it's the fact that the traditional analog last-mile=20=
> *connects you to a "real" CO*, with a "real" battery room, that's=20
> engineered -- in most cases, to cold-war standards, *through a loop =
with
> very low complexity*.
>=20
> If you have DC continuity and good balance to ground on a copper pair,=20=
> you are *done*; no intermediate gear, no batteries, no config files,
> nothing.
>=20
> All I need at the residence is a 500 set, and the complexity of =
*those*
> is super low, too.
>=20
> The real, underlying problem is that people take insufficient notice
> of all the complexity pinch points that they're engineering into loops
> in exchange for the extra controllability they get because =
everything's
> digital end to end.
>=20
> When I'm bringing 31 T-spans into my call center, that extra =
complexity
> is easily justifiable.
>=20
> For grandma's phone? Not so much.
>=20
Exactly the point I made earlier. POTS is simple, it does what it does =
and it is pretty good at it. Now, in the background, you have a whole =
lot of engineering. But I would trust a DMS100 far more than any of the =
stuff that routes IP.
POTS is cheap, easy, scalable and resistant to many disasters that would =
soon wipe any VoIP network out.
--
Leigh Porter
