internet phones

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 02:51:20PM -0500, GCC Consulting, the prominent pundit,
witicized:
> Be very careful, your phone service depends on your internet connection.
> That goes down, goodbye phone service.

Can you imagine having a conference call scheduled and then there being a
fibre cut in Chicago or Atlanta that affects the better part of 6-9 states?

Not unprecedented.  I remember a cut a couple years back in Chicago where
they had a fibre cut in Chicago and traffic routing through there wasn't
for the most part.  Some animal had gotten at the lines somehow.  They got
in and took 6hrs to repair it, I think it was.  Then, as they're pulling
out their equipment, they manage to re-cut the same line themselves, almost
doubling the outage time.  I think that was UUNet.

UUNet had another outage between 1998 and 2000; I remember that one taking
out over 3500 customers (business customers--not residential!  this was
before heavy broadband penetration, when ISDN was still pretty much
prevalent in many areas, if there was any)...in states up and down the
southeast seaboard.  Florida straight up to Virginia, and over some as
well.  It was nasty.

Now that cut may be at one carrier, but if -all- the NAP's you need to hit
even a multihomed site on another carrier fall -after- the cut, you're
screwed, end of story.  Packets do not pass "Go", and they do not collect
200ms.

> If one were to consider doing this, my suggestion would be to keep the land
> line and move it to the most minimal service one can get.  That way, when
> your ISP connection fails, you're not without phone service.

I don't think I'd have a choice here, even if I were willing to consider
it.  My broadband is a resold BellSouth DSL line through my ISP, and my
contract flat-out says that I can't switch to a CLEC without losing my DSL.

> Don't count on a cell phone either.  When the power goes out, your cell
> phone may not work.

I have a cell and I'm not fond of the reception you get in some areas.  And
if both parties are on cells, God help me.  I had that situation last week,
and I think I caught 3 in 5 words for 15min, trying to get a spec for a
program I needed to write.  Not good.

> One other thing to make sure of.  What kind of 911 service will your
> supplier offer.  Vonage was having problems offering full 911 coverage.
> That is, a 911 operator could not get your location or phone #.  They were
> ordered to correct this problem.

Not all plain old 911 services can do that, either.  I remember there at
least -used- to be a difference between 911 services on POTS, where some
had an instant ID on you, others did not, and you had to know what your
locale had.  Maybe they tightened regulations and that's changed, but I
thought Vonage's problem was that 911 didn't work -at all- unless you
subscribed to it, and they claimed to have had problems supplying it to
some regions.

I've been using VOIP solutions that are (granted) not telephone-endpoint
based since '95 when I got iPhone.  They're mic+speakers solutions.  I've
done iPhone, HoneyQ, iVocalize, Roger Wilco, TeamSpeak, and probably half a
dozen others.  Haven't tried Ventrillo, but I may.  The problem, no matter
how good the codec (and some of these have 44.1KHz codec's, where I heard
POTS is about 8KHz) or what the endpoint device is, is that if the wrong
router goes down, *poof*.  Richard's absolutely right on this.  There's no
way I'd even consider it, no matter the additional cost.  Same rationale
for paying a flat fee for unlimited long distance--it's there if I need
it, and the peace of mind in knowing that is worth the monthly fee even if
I don't use enough to justify it in a given month.  When I -do- need it,
it's there and more than makes up for what I'm paying out at other times
when I don't necessarily.  The only time I even need to look at the clock
is when I call Intl., and even then I have -really- good rates.  Having
had $450+/mo phone bills more than a few times in the past, I can really
appreciate never having to worry about it again, cell or land-line.

I can't recall my land-line going completely dead for anything other than
an unpaid bill (hey, it happened once) since...hell, since I was born.  I
don't think I've ever actually had a dead line, even in a really massive
storm, in 35 years.  Worst was that nasty hard ground I had a year ago,
and they fixed that in a week--and it was still usable if we spoke loudly
on both ends.  Comparatively, you can have a border router in the carrier
core play sorority-girl on you for the better part of a day or two, and
there's not a thing you or your ISP can do about it.  You're more likely to
be isolated from a larger range of locations online than you are with POTS,
in my experience.

I'm kind of waiting for the next SQL Slammer type attack to hit.  That
happened before Vonage got really big.  Took down over half the root
nameservers, I believe, and a good portion of the backbones were rendered
inoperable.  I saw part of the NANOG mail traffic from that event and it
was just frighteningly devastating.  That kind of DoS doesn't happen with
regular phone service.  Then there'll be a huge furor--even though people
put themselves at risk to save a few bucks a month.  Not worth it, IMHO.
It's like buying insurance--when you need it, you're damned glad you have
it.

mark->