Larry J. Plato <ljp@ans.net> wrote:
Connectionless and Connection oriented both refer to packet switched technologies, whereas the phone company uses circuit switched technology. ...
This is a terminological question. Here the talk was about connectionless and connection-oriented _network_ layer; not the transport layer.
The connection-oriented packet routing network is a generalized case of circuit switching -- you can multiplex connections differently.
The fundamental difference between connectionless and connection-oriented networks is the amount of state necessarily kept by gateways in order ...
SS7 (Signalling System 7) is a connectionless packet switched technology used to control the setup and teardown of circuit switched calls. Originally is was used as a database query technology to make 800 numbers portable across carriers. If this did not make sense I can descibe it in a little mnore detail offline.
Vadim makes my point better than I did - SS7 etc. make their routing decision OTO once per call (on call setup). IP makes it once per packet. Therefore you can put a lot more effort into finding the correct route if you only have to perform the calculation once. This was an algorthmic point not a network/transport layer point. Alex Bligh Xara Networks