On 28 Feb 2011, at 23:15, Jay Ashworth wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Joe Greco" <[email protected]> > >> 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
