Is anyone going to jump on the irony of the last two paragraphs? Having to use
the excessively rigid, slow, static, boring expensive PSTN to fix the cool,
fast, flexible cheap, cool, fun Internet? That'll work just fine, of course.
Until, that is, one of the telcos in the path saves a few bucks and routes a
call leg over the Internet.
What will us network operators do when there is NO out of band management path
to anything? What will happen when you can't even place a phone call?
The PSTN ran about 80 years or so on in-band signaling until a very rational
cost/benefit decision was made to remove signaling from the traffic path.
Physically seperating signaling (SS7) and routing (LERG, etc) paths from the
traffic (for all but the access link) was a large, expensive, difficult effort,
but worth it. The PSTN is full of quasi-governmental central authorities for
everything, and is all the better for it.
At some point, the best-effort, cooperative, come-as-you-are paradigm that let
the Internet grow fast and far will probably be overtaken by the societal need
for reliable, deterministic, assured performance. This thread has discussed
only evolutionary, incremental improvements. Who are the revolutionaries among
us?
MD
Steven Bellovin smb at cs.columbia.edu
Sun May 9 13:32:57 UTC 2010
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________________________________
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/08/business/AP-US-TEC-Fragile-Internet.html
It's a pretty reasonable article, too, though I don't know that I agree about
the "simplicity of the routing system"....
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
