Bellheads gave us a network that was almost perfectly reliable, with latency as close to zero as the propagation of electrons through a wire (or light through a pipe) would allow.
Honestly, this is true. In some ways, it reminds me of grow up technologies v. grow down technologies [1]; the highly-reliable high-cost technologies ("groow-down" technologies) tend to get out-competed by cheaper and less reliable but good enough technologies ("grow-up" technologies). After those technologies win, the need for the high reliability of the grow-down technologies still exists for some use cases, so the grow-up technology tends to have facilities to allow it to attain that level of reliability tacked on. This generally seems to get the grow-up technology almost, _but not quite_, to the original level of reliability of the grow-down technology. The IP version of this for VoIP is "use a private network, carrier hotels, QoS", etc.
On all aspects but reliability I don't see much to advocate for in the PSTN though. The lack of separation between the network and the applications running over it is particularly awful (the modern materialisation of this issue is that you might be able to call number X, but not SMS it, or vice versa, because the way these different applications are transported and routed is my knowledge completely different.) We saw what the telco conception of networking looked like with things like ISDN or X.25. I'm pretty happy that vision didn't win.
> On all aspects but reliability I don't see much to advocate for in the PSTN though.
VOIP latency is significantly worse too. Reliability is good enough, IMHO, but I think most people are using 20ms samples and two samples per packet, which is 40ms behind, plus a jitter buffer, etc. On the plus side, nethead routing may be using better routes than bellhead, but that's probably only saving 10ms (if that) on trip from one coast to the other.
This is a good point. Latency tends to be the Achilles heel of any digital technology not specifically designed to keep latency low. In true "grow-up" vein Ethernet has had to try and improve in this regard with TSN, etc. The IETF also has a 'deterministic networking' WG.
You can find all sorts of dead interconnect technologies which genuinely offered better latency/jitter/etc. than grow-up technologies like Ethernet or USB, like Fibre Channel or Firewire. Interestingly if you go digging, there was once some specification for using Fibre Channel for audio/video transmission... wonder if anyone still has any of that equipment lying around. It's pretty sad how these things die off when they can offer superior performance, but it seems to end up just not being better _enough_.
VoIP latency is definitely a pity. My guess is we could probably improve the situation with specialised codecs which focus on latency rather than bandwidth efficiency, but I can't imagine ever beating the latency of TDM. The synchronicity of TDM networks is certainly one of the more interesting aspects of them; you can read a book about T1/E1 now and be struck by the synchronicity of it all relative to Ethernet. To my knowledge a major motivation for Ethernet's TSN extensions is to allow clock signals to be reliably propagated to cell carrier hardware which is switching from T/E-carriers to Ethernet, and which is accustomed to being able to transfer not just data but a clock reference via their uplinks.
Betamax was technically inferior in one way that mattered quite a lot.
VHS could play a two-hour movie with a single cassette right from the start. Betamax at the time was limited to one hour, so anyone who bought or rented a typical movie of more than one hour but less than two had to switch cassettes midway through. VHS could play the whole thing in one go.
Even for the rare movie that was more than two hours, this meant two VHS cassettes vs. three Betamax cassettes.
Betamax II and III were introduced later, with longer running times due to slower tape speed (and lower quality), but these were too late to the party.
Like digital TV having a channel switch delay there's some inherent delay to VoIP. It's not noticeable if it's designed correctly. The wheels come off when there's way too many hops and layers and best practices are not followed. For example a customer has their cellphone on speakerphone in a weak signal area while driving, and the employee is using an in-browser softphone on VPN on Wi-Fi on cable Internet. That's when you get 500 ms of delay that's like satellite.
The "Bellhead" network was a machine for extracting as much surplus value as possible while preventing unlicensed innovation. The internet let people invent services without having to pay the monopolist.
A similar thing played out with smartphones; telcos wanted to capture the entire value, until they were outcompeted by Apple capturing all (or at least 30%) of the value through the app store instead.
Government regulation gave you that - it was the price the company had to pay for a monopoly, driven by utility commissions.
I had to take an escalation on-call shift today. I’m sitting on top of a ski mountain right now, outside, on HN waiting for my family after dealing with a problem. Network latency didn’t even enter into my mind in the last month.
In the Bellhead world I’d be sitting in my living room chained to the phone or on a $200/mo phone from my employer close to home. Making our modern technology stack wouldn’t have represented the best return on assets for AT&T and its successor Bell companies. Why would you deliver 500 Mbps service to a mountain?
People generally prefer an 80% functionality solution at 50% cost. Hence MP3 music downloads at 128 Kbps, the same smartphone optimized layout being reused as the desktop website, and Electron apps.
> If you look at the web, it's very much centralized today.
The web is not the network. The network, the Internet, is a collection of decentralized networks peering with one another. There are nearly 90000 ASNs in use, each of which represents one or more networks controlled by a single entity, routed globally via BGP.
I don't know about you, but nearly 90000 entities does not sound very centralized to me.
Your average user will transit at minimum 3 networks to reach any given website. The network of their ISP, the network of at least one transit ISP, and the network of the host for that site (which may also be the destination). As peering relationships for some host networks like Netflix, Google, Facebook, and AWS get deeper, it's possible that they may not need a transit ISP to connect your ISP into their host network. That said, with the exception of Google Fiber customers (which is anyway still in a separate ASN), your ISP and the destination are separate and are inter-networked in a distributed fashion.
While the "web" is relatively centralized (although has a /very/ long tail), the networks that underlay it are not.
It's actually incredible how accessible BGP is these days. Anyone can get their own "personal" ASN. Try a RIPE LIR even if you're outside Europe, it's easier and cheaper than dealing with ARIN in the US. They'll require you to have a European presence (a VPS counts!) You can then peer with various providers all over the place (either VPS or dedicated), use your IPs there, or tunnel your connectivity back to where ever you want.
I'd much rather deal with the occasional spam message than having monopolies charge everyone through their nose per the kilobyte and deciding which applications are dignified enough to even make it onto their shiny network.
Also, ironically, the only spam I get these days is via text or robocalls.
I'd gladly get rid of my phone number altogether, if it wasn't for businesses insisting on using it as a primary user identifier, verification method, and communications channel.
I receive at least 10-20 scam, robocall, or hangup calls per day. That’s hardly “occasional”.
At least we both agree on how we would get rid of our phone numbers. But the reason businesses use it as a verification method is because it is hard to get one - and it costs $$$. It’s basically a outsourced, ubiquitous, federated human identity service.
Notice how they all filter out voip numbers - because voip numbers are too cheap to acquire to rely on as a filter. They assume that only humans would pay the monthly charge for a landline or mobile number. So $$$ to pay for phone service is used as the universal “captcha” of last resort.
Netheads fucked that all up.