I highly recommend reading the book “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”, which covers much of the history that this article touches upon. Great book.
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...
They thought anything that wasn't connection oriented was nonsense. The internet basically grew in spite of the established telcos, not thru them.
Around the same time as the book, Wired had an article "Netheads vs Bellheads" [1] which covers the same tension. It's interesting to read an article from a time when it was accepted knowledge that ATM was the future of the internet, and it was newsworthy that a few heretics thought otherwise.
Sure didn't. It's a terrible way to treat voice calls, and as far as the phone company was concerned, voice was the only thing.
Data could ride a voice-grade connection just fine, but voice suffered badly when "statistically multiplexed", a term used (oft derisively) to refer to packetization.
This is still true, by the way. Radio studios still use ISDN links to other studios, because they have fixed latency and incredibly low jitter.
Customers have gotten used to the latency of digital mobile phones, but some of us still remember the truly simultaneous conversation of a landline or analog cellphone. (I remember the rollout of digital, and the... and the con.... go ahead.... no, you go ahead... okay, the confusion as people were just learning to converse with a delay on the line.) It just turned out that cheaper capacity was more important.
ATM was always a dead-end, though. I think a lot of people knew that even as it was being deployed. If you're packetizing anyway, you might as well throw QoS right out the window and embrace nondeterminism wholeheartedly. It's cheaper, and that writing was already on the wall. Quality had been the mantra for the first hundred years of the Bell system, but deregulation and competition allowed the almighty dollar to prevail over every other concern. Enjoy the jitter!
Perhaps this mindset was true at the AT&T / (eventual) RBOC level but at the R&D level I believe the story was different.
My father worked for Western Electric. For those who don't already know, WE's role was to take Bell Labs "raw" R&D and make it work commercially. In any case, when I was a pre-teen / teen (think early to mid 70's, if my memory serves me correctly) I remember going to an annual open house (for family members) an seeing demos on fiber optics.
Maybe the plan was to use fiber strictly for voice, but that feels odd to me.
p.s. Fwiw my father actually worked on a technology that then competed with fiber. As we know now, fiber won. My point is, there was a sense somewhere that additional capacity was necessary. That amount of investment for the growth of voice might be possible, but I don't think so.
“SONET was originally designed to transport circuit mode communications from a variety of different sources, but they were primarily designed to support real-time, uncompressed, circuit-switched voice encoded in PCM format.”
If you've seen the eye-watering cost of 1600 pair copper bearers, not to mention the sheer time taken to joint it, you'd see why the telcos were keen on fibre for voice.
Is it just a matter of setting up VOIP and then mercilessly debugging latency issues on both ends?
Is FaceTime or any other commercial solution close to zero latency?
If you had a physically switched circuit you could imagine that the data would travel over it at the speed of electricity in wires, while for packet switching there's some kind of software step and "hesitation" as the router "thinks" about the routing problem posed by each packet.
There are some Internet connections where the speed of light limitation dominates the routing issues, but I don't think this is the case most of the time when dealing with short-to-medium-distance connections involving multiple commercial ISPs. (Especially for peer-to-peer connections on residential broadband, you also don't have the latency benefit of a possible CDN node colocated with or direct CDN peering with your own ISP.)
So I think the best answer to most of your questions is "not really", although it would be really interesting to see a detailed breakdown in a traceroute of speed-of-physical-medium vs. various router tasks for each hop. (Then you could imagine improving some of these by changing the physical medium, reducing the number of hops via better or different peering arrangements, and getting fancier routers in some places that contribute less latency per hop.)
Periodically on HN we see pieces about the extreme lengths that people engaged in high-frequency trading will go to in order to get really low latency. Those folks know all the details of exactly where the latency comes in and exactly what could be done about it. But the huge expense and trouble that they have to go to in order to get some of these improvements suggests to me that we're probably not going to see the same improvements easily on the typical consumer broadband connection.
All of your jitter in a stable configuration router is going to be coming from those varying queue depths.
These people pay to have their servers colocated with the trading servers they are communicating with. That would be like having a VoIP call with someone sitting next to you connected to the same switch.
Real landlines work even if the power is out.
Right now in the UK there is a project to replace the emergency services radio network TETRA with a 4G based solution. Of course, it is horrifically late and over budget, so much so that it has well exceeded the costs it was supposed to save already. But its worst problem is the latency. On an old-fashioned system you can push to talk and say "don't shoot!" and be confident that's what the other callsign hears, but on the new system because of the latency all they will hear is "shoot!".
I know you're just using hyperbole make a point, but I very much doubt that the emergency services use voice commands as easily confused as "don't shoot" and "shoot".
Push-to-talk latency isn’t a problem in the “it might replace SMS” scenario the mobile industry once envisaged for it, but it is in an emergency. The classic example the Armed Forces give is to imagine a commander who has a team of snipers on a roof pointing at a target. He gives the command: “Don’t shoot”. Unfortunately, in a cellular, IP based device, it takes a fraction of a second for the app to fire up and make a connection – a fraction of a second which is just long enough for the word “Don’t” to fail to make it into the message.
If anything, it would be EASIER for digital equipment to work around this, analogous to how shutter buttons in digital cameras work: Run the microphone in always on mode and keep a short ring buffer of the audio prior to the button push.
I wish the phone companies would take another look at the way they handle voice calls. The entire experience is terrible. You can get better voice quality and less spam using just about any service (like Facetime or Skype) other than a standard voice line.
I get maybe four or five spam Skype invites per year.
Can confirm. We have a good friend here in LA who is a voice actor (among other talents).
He still pays for an ISDN line at his residence to allow remote work — obviously, high audio quality is a must have for professional use.
A generation before, with the telephone:
This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. What use could this company make of an electrical toy? - Western Union (1878)
Two generations before, with printing:
The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter. - Thomas Hobbes (17th century)
Thus...
A little bit of history, repeating... - Alex Gifford (1997)
Writing as a whole is a more difficult, more consequential, and more culturally challenging invention than printing (even though printing is definitely all three of those things).
Before print (and after it but not yet relying on it) we had literacy, schools, mathematics, written personal and scientific correspondence, accounting, and to some extent written legislation and written accounts of legal and governmental decisions. All of those things were definitely expensive and largely elite phenomena in many places, but they were all real and had enormous impacts. People today still avidly study sacred texts that were written down hundreds and even thousands of years before the advent of printing, as well as history and literature from the same timeframe.
Thomas Hobbes had his own works printed during his lifetime, so I don't think he meant to suggest that printing was a useless curiosity.
You can probably find much more naive and categorical dismissals of printing from around that time. :-)
(Also, I think you might mean "century" rather than "generation".)
You might enjoy this 1996 presentation from my old employer: https://www.slideshare.net/redpineapple/atm-sales-from-madge...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Casting-Net-ARPANET-INTERNET-System...
I have both books (each now over 20 years old), but I think "Casting the Net" is a slightly more rigorous and somewhat less "journalisty" history with a better collection of diagrams and scribbles by the key figures involved.
It's not solely about the internet but does an awesome job covering the rise of the PC industry and the launch of the internet.
Edit: the intention of my comment is to prevent another user like myself from being disappointed if they have better things to read. Reading is a time-consuming process, I'm rather annoyed when I bother to read a book that leaves me feeling like I've wasted a significant amount of time with little to show for it.
Based on another comment here, I'd recommend giving Casting the Net a read instead.
On the other hand, 95% of the non-fiction I read usually feels like it could be half as long.
Yeah. You're wasting half your time. But the question always remains: which half? ;)