What vexes VoIP users?

Mon Feb 28 23:28:49 UTC 2011

On 28 Feb 2011, at 23:15, Jay Ashworth wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Joe Greco" <jgreco at ns.sol.net>
> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> When you throw that one stupid and pointless analog hop in there, you
>> are suddenly limited and broken in so many ways.
> 
> Sure.
> 
> 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 
> *connects you to a "real" CO*, with a "real" battery room, that's 
> engineered -- in most cases, to cold-war standards, *through a loop with
> very low complexity*.
> 
> If you have DC continuity and good balance to ground on a copper pair, 
> you are *done*; no intermediate gear, no batteries, no config files,
> nothing.
> 
> All I need at the residence is a 500 set, and the complexity of *those*
> is super low, too.
> 
> 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.
> 
> When I'm bringing 31 T-spans into my call center, that extra complexity
> is easily justifiable.
> 
> For grandma's phone?  Not so much.
> 

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