At 10:14 AM 7/17/00 -0700, Karyn Ulriksen wrote:

Out of curiousity, how does the telco world handle this? When some one signs up for MCI longdistance, I assume that on some calls they will cross off the MCI network (and potentially though several others) that will be piled mile high in static. The customers will complain about their connection to their respective local and long distance companies. But I believe it isn't an option to contact the networks that they may transit mid-stream. However, some QC must be in place to achieve some level of consistancy to get that expected "pin drop" quality we've apparently come to take for granted...

The telco world is completely different. *EVERY* call has an "origination" and a "termination", and *EVERY* termination is *PAID*. So when it goes from you (user) to AT&T to MCI to Telstra to friend (user), you pay AT&T, AT&T pays MCI, and MCI pays Telstra. (I made that sequence up. I doubt a call would be routed like that, but you get the point.) So, if there is a problem inside MCI, AT&T will hound them about it. Even though no "user" is paying MCI, AT&T *is* paying them, and has every right to get upset if quality is not up to par. Plus, the user has no idea of routing in the phone system. There is no traceroute, there are no in-addrs, etc., etc. As a user, you call AT&T, and that is all you know. But that is okay, because AT&T takes full responsibility for end-to-end connectivity. If the call does not get through, they may say "MCI is having a problem", but they will work on it for you. Some may say this is why the telcos work better than the Internet. Personally, I think it is kinda silly. The way the system is laid out, it costs a lot more to bill a call than connect a call. It takes a lot more to track the minutes of a call and all the various tariffs, interconnections, time-of-day billing, billing cycles, interest / late fees, mail out a bill every month, etc., etc., etc., than it takes for a few switches to route a call over fiber which costs nearly nothing anyway. Remember, typical pricing for trans-continental US fiber, when buying dark or very large IRUs, is a few places to the right of the decimal point per month per DS0-mile - or *at most* $3/month for a cross country DS0, and for most big carriers it is orders of magnitude less. And the telcos tend to get a wee bit more than $3/month revenue off that DS0. ;) Of course, there is cap-ex for the switches & fiber lighting equipment - which is a huge expense. Plus people to operate it and stuff like that. But the point is, it costs more to bill it than to actually *do* it. I do not think we want to see the Internet go that way. Do you? I am not saying this is a valid way to run the Internet, just that it is not how I would like to see the Internet run. Perhaps my view / opinions are silly or impractical, but that is how I feel. What do all of you think?

Karyn

TTFN, patrick