Discussion point: Telco quality?

Fri Oct 9 01:02:30 UTC 1998

At 07:21 PM 10/8/98 -0400, Paul Ferguson wrote:
>This latest fiber cut just kind of jarred my brain into the
>realization of what "telco quality" services really boils down to.
>
>In the end, all services, both traditional telephony services and
>data services, are more alike than people give them credit for.  :-)

When I first went from MCI to PacBell/ACN an of PacBell veteran picked up
the hand-set and made me listen to it. He then asked me what I heard, I
said "dial tone", he said, "No, what you heard was a freaking miracle!". At
the time, our job was to make the new broadband HFC network as reliable,
but cheaper, than the local-loop system. As it turned out, he was right.
Building such a system, and keeping it running, decade after decade, *is* a
freaking miracle! We had 10,000 customers before SBC pulled the plug.

___________________________________________________ 
Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) 
e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer at mhsc.com>rmeyer at mhsc.com
Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com
Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/
___________________________________________ 
I bet the human brain is a kludge.
                -- Marvin Minsky