OT: internet phones

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2006, Fairlight wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 05:00:57PM -0700, Enrique Arredondo may or may not have
>proven themselves an utter git by pronouncing:
>> 
>> VERIZON RIP, VONAGE Rocks
>
>Let me know how that works out for you when a core router goes up and down
>for the better part of 3 days, and you can't figure out why your phone
>service doesn't work because, "[My] network connection is up..."....
...
>I'd take a pass on that risk, personally.  I can only assume that those
>taking that kind of leap have never actually dealt with 1st and 2nd peer
>carriers in any amount of detail regarding outages.  Run an ISP for a year
>and a half--it's an extreme eye opener.  Given the way the carriers don't
>cooperate and communicate on some levels, it's a miracle anything gets
>passed anywhere.

I'll second Mark on this.  I've seen many instances where network outages
or bottlenecks have made it impossible to get to some sites, or they were
very slow.

I've seen cases where I couldn't get to a customer sites in Tennessee and
North Carolina directly, but could if I first ssh'ed into another
customer's site in Indiana.  The first two are on Sprint backbones, and the
links between our provider and Sprint weren't talking at the time.

In another situation, I was installing an ISP system in San Leandro,
California, and the connection back to our office was approximating a 2,400
baud dialup.  I could see the bottleneck using traceroute, but getting
their backbone provider to do something about was hopeless (a major ILEC in
that part of the world).

There's still far too much of Lily Tomlin's ``I'm the phone company, and I
don't have to care'' around.  It probably won't get any better as the
number of major backbone providers decreases, and competition diminishes.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

``Capitalism works primarily because most of the ways that a company can be
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