On 28 Feb 2011, at 23:15, Jay Ashworth wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Greco" <jgreco@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