I was wondering. Maybe I should. Maybe I shoudn't. It's a bit expensive, after all. Perhaps I should give them a treat. After all, the Nine Zero seems like a decent hotel, and Boston is a pricey city. You can even get special deals. But in the end my parents will just have to put up with whatever Priceline deals them when they come over.
Anyway, enough of Nine Zero, and onto Zero Nines. Arrigo Triulzi over at the exceedingly illuminating CircleID is fretting that the move to VoIP will result in low quality of service and susceptibility to denial of service attacks.
Surely that's a pretty impressive record if, over the space of approximately 15 years I can recall each [circuit-switched network] outage with precision.
Where does one start with IP outages? From the DSLAM mis-configurations which plague my current "el-cheapo" provider and the upstream monopoly wholesaler, or to the frequent routing hiccups, or the DNS timeouts?
... People expect a phone to work at any time of the day or night and this is simply not the case with IP. There are too many variables: routers, IP routing tables, proper working of QoS settings are just a sample. Can we really trust IP routers as much as we trust switchboards? I think not.
What Arrigo forgets is that the rigidity of the circuit network comes at a terrible cost. He gets zero nines availability for all applications other than traditional voice calls. No webcams, email, web, IM, chat, P2P music, etc. The ultimate service not available tone. A pancosmic 404 error.
Let's also contemplate for a moment a real, conceivable disaster. One that consumes millions of lives, and where a robust communications network can save many of those lives. Hmm. How about a giant tsunami that crashes on the shores of the North Atlantic?
Want to notify a few hundred million people of the imminent danger? Everyone abuzz following the huge waves that hit Africa? Circuit network immediately dies. Packet network gracefully degrades under load. Bandwidth-hungry services get starved. Cheap text messages get through.
So if you're in a nice place on the east coast of the USA, and value your long-term security, I'd suggest you bet your life on a packet-switched network, not a circuit-switched one.
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