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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Too much is failing from single point outages. The FCC may have to establish standards to prevent over-centralization.

In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason than a natural disaster or, one occasion, a major file. That record has not been maintained in the Internet era.

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The Bell System's job was to operate a nationwide telephone system for voice, not high-speed data. Even then, you only had one path to the telephone CO and only one CO it could go to. Outages were rare because voice-grade wire is cheap and all the complexity is handled by the CO.

Also, while my Internet may have outages from time to time, I can't recall the last time I couldn't use my cell phone other than being in a bad signal area. For voice, cellular is definitely the way to go as capacity is easily added by adding new towers; not something easy to do with landlines.

What do you mean by saying the wire is cheap? Obviously you can’t send much high frequency data down the wire but each wire could only be used for one call at a time for much of the company’s history, so more wires were needed. What effect does that have on the cost? And surely the complexity is still in the CO with the internet, or am I missing something?

> And surely the complexity is still in the CO with the internet

Your cable modem (which has a CPU and does high-speed signaling) or your FIOS box is much more complicated than an analog phone.

The carrier-grade router on the other end of your cable modem is really just a bigger version of routers you buy off the shelf or for enterprises. It's literally routing IP packets in the same way.

Whereas you have to have a whole switching system at the other end of an analog voice CO. (Or an operator making physical connections if we're still in the 1800's). The best you can do for yourself in that world today is get an PBX system like an old NEC NEAX box or similar, but you're still not going to be on the same level as the CO.

Natural disasters sometimes take out cellular service in large areas. Definitely happened for several days during Hurricane Sandy in NY.

They can get temporary cellular devices to fill in on generator power pretty quickly. I know most if not all phone lines are underground, but something like a 2000-pair "wet pulp" repair (necessary in the first place due to negligence) takes a week. I don't know the name of these devices but something of that nature was deployed in Nashville on Dec 25 when the AT&T building was bombed and I think most cell service downtown was restored the next day.

Most of the early internet piggy backed on the bell system: 56k, T1, T3 lines, frame relay, ISDN... and of course dialup.

>no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason than a natural disaster or, one occasion, a major file

Are these systems even comparable? Today /= yesterday phone service....

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