[VoiceOps] Geographic redundancy

[Alex Balashov]

Kenny Sallee wrote:

> One thing you did mention is that telco's don't like the move to IP - 
> what are their arguments against it?

The first argument from the ILECs is a generic one, but possibly the 
most important: They have very significant revenue streams, capital 
investments, institutional knowledge and training, business processes, 
technology stacks, etc. associated with TDM infrastructure that they 
want to protect.  They already paid (a lot) for them, so they want to 
squeeze every last bit of ROI possible from them.  Nobody likes 
expensive stuff to become obsolete, especially on a large scale.

The second big argument generally has to do with the lack of reliability 
of IP gear and IP networks compared to their older, single-purpose 
synchronous cousins.  This is generally justifiable;  they've had a lot 
longer to get TDM right, and the vendors that do TDM well have done so 
for a while.  The ecosystem of commercial IP gear is inherently a lot 
more 'open' and heterogenous, even though it may not seem like that in 
the enterprise network hardware segment.  Without proper steps to 
mitigate it, which are the sorts of steps younger people have more time 
for, a rogue PC on the network can impact your voice service.

The argument I usually hear is, "And if the Ethernet goes down, our 
(IP-based) softswitch service is down too.  But if I keep it TDM for as 
long as possible and drag it into the core that way, phone will still be 
up."  Probably, but I'm not sure it's  Paereto-optimal solution.


-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
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