What vexes VoIP users?

Tue Mar 1 07:22:51 UTC 2011

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Leigh Porter
<leigh.porter at ukbroadband.com> wrote:
> 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.

I wouldn't call DMS100 a "cheap" platform.  The switch gear is
expensive, features are expensive, floor space is expensive, training
is expensive, and provisioning, for the most part, is stuck in the
dark ages.

Sure, it works, but to make the generalization that it's cheaper than
modern VoIP switching is just incorrect.  Besides that, if you have
done much DMS100 ops, you are well aware that there are many
(infrequent) tasks that require multi-hour outages of major DMS100
components, e.g. one of the two CMs (control plane, for unfamiliar
readers.)  In addition, the official maintenance procedures often
don't tell you how to perform these tasks without taking the whole
switch out of service.

A growing number of end-users are perfectly happy with no land-line
and no VoIP, relying only on cellular phone service.  I'm sure that
cellular is generally orders of magnitude less reliable than POTS.
I'm sure most VoIP offerings are somewhere in-between.  End-users are
going to choose the product they want, and for many, the choice will
be to save hundreds of dollars per year while sacrificing a little bit
of reliability which they are unlikely to notice or miss.

-- 
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts