At 2:06 AM -0500 10/28/01, Sean Donelan wrote:
...Although it receives limited public discussion, the public telephone network has significant risks in comparison to the Internet. Because of the public discussion, and customer demand, ISPs have been forced to invest a lot of money in network backups and now offer SLA's significantly better than any telephone company offers. On the other hand the telephone network has been undergoing a lot of "value engineering" for the last decade, reducing their network backups.
I wonder if we have reached the cross-over point, and the Internet is now effectively more reliable than the public telephone network.
FYI, at about the time of the break, I was engaged in a Web-based meeting that included the Maui Supercomputer Center. We were using a phone bridge in San Jose, CA. The phone conversation persisted, but Maui's Internet connection dropped. --Steve --