On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Leigh Porter <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com> wrote:
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.
I wouldn't call DMS100 a "cheap" platform. The switch gear is expensive, features are expensive, floor space is expensive, training is expensive, and provisioning, for the most part, is stuck in the dark ages. Sure, it works, but to make the generalization that it's cheaper than modern VoIP switching is just incorrect. Besides that, if you have done much DMS100 ops, you are well aware that there are many (infrequent) tasks that require multi-hour outages of major DMS100 components, e.g. one of the two CMs (control plane, for unfamiliar readers.) In addition, the official maintenance procedures often don't tell you how to perform these tasks without taking the whole switch out of service. A growing number of end-users are perfectly happy with no land-line and no VoIP, relying only on cellular phone service. I'm sure that cellular is generally orders of magnitude less reliable than POTS. I'm sure most VoIP offerings are somewhere in-between. End-users are going to choose the product they want, and for many, the choice will be to save hundreds of dollars per year while sacrificing a little bit of reliability which they are unlikely to notice or miss. -- Jeff S Wheeler <jsw@inconcepts.biz> Sr Network Operator / Innovative Network Concepts