Netheads versus Bellheads / PSTN stats

yellum

http://www.tmdenton.com/netheads.htm

The emergence of the Internet is well measured by the proportion of data traffic to voice traffic on networks. Internet traffic is doubling very four months, whereas voice traffic, which is limited to the characteristics of people talking on telephones, grows by 6-9% annually. The result is that voice traffic will decline to less than 8% of total network traffic by 2004, and its relative decline will continue. Based on current levels of growth, the entire traffic on the PSTN may amount to less than one percent of the total before 2010.

Not a lot of pictures and its long but an interesting read none the less

Xian

There are more choice quotes from this. Though it was written in '98 it's still relevant.

Two systems are in collision, the packet-routing signalling system called the Internet, and the circuit-switched telephone system.

The important feature of the PSTN business model is this: the telephone company would define what services are offered. Noone else has the ability to define the nature of services offered over public telephone networks.

When network ownership is de-coupled from value creation, carriers derive no benefit from this new value beyond the new traffic it spawns. For this reason, the Bellheads will fight the Internet vision with all their strength.

[The telcos] desire to "recover investments" may be no more than the desire to be paid rent on obsolete equipment for a long time.

What is chiefly missing in the Internet, from the telephone company point of view, is a control system.

SS7 ["the communications protocol utilized throughout the telephone control environment"] is not an end-to-end protocol. There is no need for a "control layer" equivalent to SS7 in the Internet.

Circuit switching was designed to optimize a key scarcity, the setting up of a call, so that it would only need to be done once per call. Originally, setup used to be done by operators, then expensive electro-mechanical switches replaced the operators. Advances in electronics allowed these functions to be further performed by expensive computers. Now, call set-up resources are so abundant that a call can be set up millions of times a second, which is precisely what packet routing is, only for tiny packets instead of circuits

A precedent exists for intervention by government into the physical construction of switches in the PSTN era. When long distance calling was made competitive, governments mandated equal access so that dialling numbers was made the same for competitors and incumbents. This required expenditures by incumbents to change their switches to accomplish this.

[T]he rise in popularity of the internet has annihilated the sustainability of the CLEC [Competitive Local Exchange Carrier] business model. Noone expects long-distance to subsidize local exchange services anymore.

SS7 is antique, it is fragile, it is closed, it is insecure, and it is at the core of the ability of the owners of the PSTN to define what services are.

We have observed in the course of the last 18 months the growing conviction on the part of all players in the networking game that the PSTN as we have known it is going to be significantly less important, tending to insignificance relative to the volume of data traffic, and that networks based on IP will prevail.

[a possibility] is that the 'last mile' problem will be evaded by the ability of municipalities to offer rights of way, either by themselves or by allowing others to lay fiber.

sceptre

Originally posted by Xian
Two systems are in collision, the packet-routing signalling system called the Internet, and the circuit-switched telephone system.

I suppose (with 20/20 hindsight) this was always going to be the case. After Paul Baran first started poking around for the AT&T network layout, the free code layer of TCP/IP was designed to be as different as possible to the controlled physical layer (yes, I robbed those terms from Larry Lessig - ch2 of "The Future of ideas" is a good read on this). It's open systems versus closed systems again - the economies of scale generated quickly generated by open systems (OK the Internet has been around for a long time, but not on a commercial level) are going to have an advantage over a closed system every time. Of course in Ireland we've a very closed physical layer (the telephone lines) given that Eircom totally control the local loop.

Nice link yellum. I haven't time to read through all of it at the moment but I'll pop it on this weekend's reading list.