I think we often forget just how much of a massive inversion the 

communications industry has undergone; back in the 80s, when 

I started working in networking, everything was DS0 voice channels, 

and data was just a strange side business that nobody in the telcos 

really understood or wanted to sell to.  At the time, the volume of money 

being raked in from those DS0/VGE channels was mammoth compared 

to the data networking side; we weren't even a rounding error.  But as the 

roles reversed and the pyramid inverted, the data networking costs didn't

rise to meet the voice costs (no matter how hard the telcos tried to push

VGE-mileage-based pricing models! 

Haha, when I was at Cisco in the late 90's and was working on VoIP stuff we were working with Sprint trying to get them onboard for a residential voice project. They were really insistent on using AAL2 to conserve bandwidth. I told them at the time that the bandwidth for voice was going to be insignificant and it wasn't a big deal that RTP wasn't as efficient. They looked at me like i had leprosy with body parts falling off. Like the next month it was announced that data had surpassed voice for the first time. We didn't get the contract, fwiw. But they never launched anything either. Was there ever any significant deployment of AAL2?

Mike