Aswath Weblog

Big Hang-ups in “The Big Hang-up”

Andy Abramson points out a story in economist.com. As he says, the platform may be high-browed and intellectual but the story is certainly sensational. It is clear that the correspondent (who writes in “professional” third person with no clear identification) needs a bit more exposure to telephony and the editors have not done their job. And I am not talking about the regulatory matters at all, of which I plead ignorance.

Here are some of the pearls that I hope don’t require any further explanations:

1. [Allocating its own switched circuit for the duration of the call is] what made the old telephone service so reliable—and led to the notion of “five nines” (ie, lines being up and running for typically 99.999% of the time).
2. [S]witched circuits proved a hopelessly inefficient way to meet the burgeoning demand of general use. (Isn’t bandwidth cost negligible or is it only in the Internet?)
3. [VoIP] being digital to start with, it makes it easier to implement and cheaper to provide things like three-way calling, call forwarding and caller ID … (A couple of years back, widely acclaimed router guru who was considering to get on the VoIP bandwagon claimed that PSTN is analog till he was poked. The reporter obviously does not realize that three-way calling is natural in the analog domain. Don’t we get Caller ID on the “analog” PSTN?)
4. Remark about Skype and its inexpensive interconnect rates. (I guess your correspondent hasn’t yet received the memo that Skype is not the darling anymore. Or this person not making it clear that the interconnect charges is no better than what a PSTN caller can get it from many calling card companies.)

Of course the biggest omission is that this correspondent fails to point out that most of the VoIP providers fail to deliver on the promises of VoIP. For example, SIP provides for the caller to indicate the subject of the call. Can you imagine an email client that does that? But most of the VoIP clients do not have this capability. And the list goes on. I think this is “the big hang-up”. After all the historical high cost of PSTN calls is not news anymore – it has been taken over by events.