On Tue, 11 May 2010, Mmaad Dooog wrote:
Is anyone going to jump on the irony of the last two paragraphs? Having to use the excessively rigid, slow, static, boring expensive PSTN to fix the cool, fast, flexible cheap, cool, fun Internet? That'll work just fine, of course. Until, that is, one of the telcos in the path saves a few bucks and routes a call leg over the Internet.
What will us network operators do when there is NO out of band management path to anything? What will happen when you can't even place a phone call?
The PSTN ran about 80 years or so on in-band signaling until a very rational cost/benefit decision was made to remove signaling from the traffic path. Physically seperating signaling (SS7) and routing (LERG, etc) paths from the traffic (for all but the access link) was a large, expensive, difficult effort, but worth it. The PSTN is full of quasi-governmental central authorities for everything, and is all the better for it.