On Mon, 11 Dec 2000, Don Stokes wrote:

> The folks at Murray Hill wouldn't have had trouble making that leap.
> But they're not the telco.

Actually, until 1996, most of them were, before Lucent was spun off - they
were part of AT&T.

Bell Labs have rather a good understanding of the PSTN, having either
invented or built most of it.

> Telco types were scared stiff of packets.

This is a trusim. I've found telcos internationally represent the general
population in packet-headedness. Hate to say it, but the North American
ones are the smartest.

Some APAC telcos certainly have the n * 64K syndrome. But your statement
doesn't hold true out of Australasia.

A similiar problem is ISPs who are scared-stiff of circuits. Our VPN
provider isn't one of those.

> I really heard telco types talking like this; they really thought that
> folks would be using ADSL like a telephone, just with more bandwidth.

Why not? This is actually how it's sold in many places; you can put a
"regular" TV signal down without having to packetized/encode it; cheap and
simple (much like a cable modem, in fact).

Back in 1993, who were you gonna call with 6Mb/s then? 128kb/s would've
been plenty fast enough. As much as some ISPs had for their whole user
base, in fact.

> Mind you, at the time, telcos hadn't figured out that folks would
> spend many hours a month on Internet calls to one phone number either.

Actually, I've seen telcos worry about this for most of the last decade,
if not more. The problem is that there is no quick fix; you can't just
"replace" and "upgrade" the PSTN (as some NZ pundits put it).

Nowadays the technology is starting to catch up; there are a few serious
softswitches on the market that can control NASes via SS7, and hook up to
the PSTN as peers with IMTs.

One of my jobs is development of devices that slot directly into a 5E
backplane - the access server being part of the exchange itself.

Of course, you've never worked for a telco/in an international
environment; you've never architected a large voice or access
network. It's not surprising you don't understand the issues.

--
Josh Bailey (josh@vandervecken.com - Berkeley, CA, USA)
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