[HN Gopher] Netheads vs. bellheads redux: the strange victory of...
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Netheads vs. bellheads redux: the strange victory of SIP over the
telephone
Author : xrayarx
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-01-28 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.devever.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.devever.net)
| smallerfish wrote:
| Once there are universally reachable cellular data networks, the
| days of the phone network are numbered. A "phone number" is an
| antiquated concept, and the network has been ruined by spam.
| Messaging apps will prevail.
| supertrope wrote:
| There will never be universal coverage. Even in the largest
| cities there are dead zones.
|
| A car rental business that assumes 100% Internet access
| availability discovered the problem of customers parking the
| cars in parking garages (signal dead zones). They did not have
| an offline activation mode and had to tow the car. When any
| given customer triggered too many tows, they fired the
| customer.
|
| The PSTN is not going anywhere. You can choose to cut yourself
| off from it by refusing to take calls unless it's via an app.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| They skip the history of ATM, the bellheads attempt to transfer
| the SS7 signalling system to modern technology. But ATM was never
| more than a transport technology for IP.
| jeffbee wrote:
| How can you say they skip ATM when "Netheads vs Bellheads" is
| entirely about ATM?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Easy, skip reading it.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| ATM or BISDN are not mentioned. The bellheads protocol was
| not H.323 but Q.2931 https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.2931/en.
| Also, the netheads were not so sure of success and created
| the ATM Forum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATM_Forum
| sneak wrote:
| One thing I think people today have forgotten is how much better
| everything was when circuit-switched instead of packet-switched.
|
| Phones used to be _so good_. Now with VoLTE and suchlike, they
| are almost universally somewhat shit even in ideal conditions.
| mgaunard wrote:
| I worked on bridging h320 and h323.
|
| Still was harder than h323 to sip.
| YouWhy wrote:
| I think of the difference more as a Kuhnian paradigm shift,
| rather than than as clan warfare.
|
| The whole value chain changed. PSTN is a highly fragile, highly
| standardized, high expertise technology that was possible using
| very rudimentary but custom hardware.
|
| IP telephony is essentially a repurposing of commodity IP
| connectivity, that uses modern commodity hardware (highly complex
| but well encapsulated) and requires a fraction of the personnel
| with a lot less years of expertise to work.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| It's a post I wish I'd have written. I represented my employer at
| the time (98-00) at GSMA, MWIF, 3GPP/3GIP. The difference in
| cultures in the "big room" was a shock to this young engineer and
| product manager. Of course the really interesting stuff happened
| in smaller ante-rooms of the forum. I left that period orders of
| magnitude less naive about such large bodies, politics, vested
| interests, lobbying, and the standards making process in general.
| Incase you hadn't guessed, I was part of the small delegation of
| "netheads".
| nikanj wrote:
| VoIP won, at the cost of making mostly everyone just ignore all
| calls now. The calls are incredibly cheap, so 99.997% of calls
| the average person gets are VoIP spam.
| dboreham wrote:
| An extra "overlay signaling network" has been added: nobody
| answers a phone call unless they received an
| email/signal/SMS/slack to let them know it is coming.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Adding to this, the last time it was mentioned here I started
| watching SIP SRV requests on my DNS servers and sure enough
| it's non stop. I added bogus records and the bots follow them
| and try to connect.
|
| Now I just need to find a medium interaction SIP honeypot /
| tarpit. I already do this for SMTP. Perhaps there is a way to
| run Asterisk in some debugging mode to accept anything, never
| tried.
| yokem55 wrote:
| There are kamailio setups that just respond to every request
| with a 200 OK, and then log the source in a db. If you want
| to get fancy with that you could make it reply to invites
| with 100 Trying and make them wait a bit for whatever timout
| they want to have. The problem with tarpiting them though is
| that it is hard to make them tie up more resources then you
| spend on it. SMTP can abuse tcp to send replies 1 charachter
| at a time with long delays between each one. SIP TCP doesn't
| really have the same capability.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I will give Kamailio a shot. It's at least a starting point
| so I can get some stats on what a majority of them are
| doing. It seems Kamailio is already in the Alpine Linux
| repository so that saves me a step.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| With SIP you'll probably need to exploit SIP directly, not
| the underlying protocol.
|
| Things like redirect loops may confuse callers. With a bit
| of luck you can redirect the caller to call
| sip:defaultspamuser@localhost so it calls itself, or
| redirect it to another bot you've detected to make the
| spammers bother each other.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Funnily enough, this problem is very localized. I've received
| two or three spam calls in my life, all of them foreign numbers
| hanging up immediately and hoping I'd call them back so they
| can charge excessive service fees.
|
| Call spam is more of a cultural problem than a technological
| one, the relevant culture being the government's and the
| telcos' culture of not giving a damn about people when there's
| money or bribes/"campaign investments" to be made.
|
| Compare, for instance, your average messaging app:
| WhatsApp/Facetime/Signal/Telegram offer calls for no cost at
| all, yet spam is almost entirely non-existent there, because
| these companies have an interest in keeping their customers
| happy.
| noAnswer wrote:
| I think you are right. My parents German landline received
| way more spam calls in the 1990s than now. Now it's almost
| non existence, despite the number being unchanged since 40
| years and in public telephone books.
|
| - Unsolicited commercial calls got outlawed.
|
| - Giving your ok to being called for ad-stuff can't be
| combined with other oks.
|
| - Foreign telecom networks can't pretend to have a German
| number. Local providers are required to strip the number,
| making the call look less trustworthy.
|
| - Having the minute price being said when calling an
| expensive number.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Funnily enough, this problem is very localized. I've
| received two or three spam calls in my life
|
| Can you elaborate on your local? I can't imagine anyone in
| the US having this experience.
|
| My US number is in a low-density area code and changes every
| other month; I still need to use a call screening app.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm in the Netherlands, but other European countries seem
| to report very similar things.
|
| Business phone numbers, especially mobile numbers, get
| attacked by scammers constantly, but even those don't
| always bad enough to warrant the need for a USA-level call
| filter.
|
| Plenty of other scams (for example, targeting the elderly
| through their landlines or over WhatsApp) but non-business
| numbers get very few scam phone calls.
| icedchai wrote:
| I get about 4 or 5 "probably a scam" calls a day. It's
| incredible. I used to bait the scammers and waste their time,
| but I think they put me on their shit list so I get even more
| calls now.
| Aloha wrote:
| Even if SHAKEN/STIR was added to SS7 and H.323 it's not clear it
| would be added to any of the software for the remaining TDM
| switching hardware. Those platforms are in sustaining support and
| many of them are unlikely to see any software updates at all in
| the remaining ~15 years they have before being turned down.
| Arathorn wrote:
| This is a really good read. My team has been implementing VoIP/IM
| protocols since around 2003, and we started off with H.323, then
| ISUP/PRI then H.324, then (briefly) IAX, then SIP, then IMS, then
| RCS, then added XMPP, and then decided to start afresh and we
| created Matrix in 2014.
|
| The really frustrating thing was how SIP just mimics the 1:1
| circuit switched calling semantics of the old PSTN. Stuff like
| messaging and group-calling and group-conversations is bolted on
| badly. Stuff like E2EE barely exists at all. From our
| perspective, SIP monumentally failed: it had an incredible
| opportunity to create an open decentralised communication layer
| for the internet using "nethead-friendly" culture... but all it
| did was reinvent the semantics of the PSTN across private
| federations.
|
| Meanwhile, the actual communication semantics that people expect
| today (and for the last ~10 years) don't resemble the PSTN at
| all: they expect synchronised conversation history across
| multiple devices; typing notifications; read receipts; presence;
| file transfer; multiway video conferencing; stickers; reactions;
| E2EE etc. etc. In other words, they want the
| iMessage/Facetime/WhatsApp/Slack/Discord/Teams/Telegram
| featureset - they do _not_ want something that pretends to be a
| 1890s vintage candlestick telephone.
|
| So this is why Matrix attempts to provide a nethead-friendly open
| standard for the featureset that users expect for communication
| these days: i.e. conversation history synchronised between
| devices; E2EE; group conversations as a first class citizen; and
| we even provide an open standard (possibly the first one?) for
| multiparty voice/video calls: https://github.com/matrix-
| org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/Sim....
|
| Hopefully the story does not end with SIP(!) :)
| MattJ100 wrote:
| > The really frustrating thing was how SIP just mimics the 1:1
| circuit switched calling semantics of the old PSTN. Stuff like
| messaging and group-calling and group-conversations is bolted
| on badly.
|
| Yeah, I remember the period when XMPP was unsuccessfully trying
| to grow audio/video extensions (eventually fixed by Google's
| contribution of their Jingle efforts). Meanwhile the SIP
| ecosystem was unsuccessfully trying to grow messaging features.
| The two worlds (messaging and telephony) were for a long time
| like oil and water.
|
| I'm glad those days seem to be behind us, though the tendency
| towards a WebRTC monoculture (which in turn descends from
| Jingle) does concern me a bit.
|
| > (possibly the first one?) for multiparty voice/video calls
|
| The protocol for multi-party Jingle was specified by the Jitsi
| team back in 2011: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0298.html
|
| This is still the foundation of the protocol that Jitsi uses
| today, I believe.
| userbinator wrote:
| SIP was supposed to be the equivalent of email, but instead we
| got a bunch of proprietary systems which do not interoperate well
| or at all (and sometimes even offer SIP as an extra-cost,
| limited-feature addition).
| wmf wrote:
| In retrospect I wonder if VoIP was worth it. Phone calls now have
| worse quality. Many of the Internet backbones merged with telcos
| and got infected with their gold-plating mindset so now the
| Internet costs more (although it's probably negligible compared
| to last-mile costs).
| dn3500 wrote:
| I was involved in the IETF in the 1990s and had a good friend who
| was one of the architects of SIP. I was not involved in SIP
| myself but marveled at how complicated the protocol was. I
| believe RFC 2543 (SIP) was at the time the longest RFC ever
| published. I had the impression that the complication was due to
| undue influence from bellheads. But looking back it was probably
| more due to the necessity of interoperation with the PSTN.
| mhandley wrote:
| SIP didn't start out complicated. If you go back to the origial
| internet drafts Henning and I wrote, it was really really
| simple. Well, our original UDP-based SIP was simpler than
| Henning's TCP-based SCIP, but neither was complicated. It
| gained a little complexity when we merged our protocols, but it
| really gained complexity along the way to standardization as
| people kept wanting to cover telco-like corner cases.
|
| At the start, Microsoft and Intel had backed H.323, and SIP was
| just us academics doing our own thing. Everyone told us we had
| no hope against Microsoft and Intel. But SIP started to get
| traction when the telcos (particularly Internet MCI) started to
| get interested in VoIP and concluded that SIP (especially SIP
| proxies) fitted what the wanted better than H.323. The downside
| with having your main allies being telcos was that telco-stop
| kept creeping in, until in the end SIP was no longer simple.
| RhysU wrote:
| Those protocols are just plain mean. For example, RFC 3261
| defined a non-transitive equality operation.
| somat wrote:
| That has always been my impression is sip. Every time I deal
| with it I go "There is no way you would invent something that
| complicated in a greenfield ip native environment, it is too
| full of odd gadgets inherited from telco land".
| nico wrote:
| > Moreover it's designed to support federated calls between
| internet domain names, just as email is federated by domain
| names. Theoretically SIP could have been deployed on the public
| internet in much the same way email is today, with email
| addresses reused as SIP identifiers, meaning that you could call
| an email address directly and without contracting with or paying
| any intermediary.
|
| What hurdles are there to this happening and phone numbers being
| replaced with email addresses?
| somat wrote:
| Nothing at all, however I made the mistake when I set up my sip
| system of using names, it turns out there is a really awkward
| disconnect between the ui of traditional phones and using
| names. something about it being very hard to type in a name
| from a numeric keypad.
|
| However, you don't have to use names, ip addresses work just as
| well as phone numbers, and you can type the on a traditional
| phone keypad.
| supertrope wrote:
| The mother of all network effects. People ask for your phone
| number based on the PSTN format tel:800-NNN-XXXX. 0% of people
| have a sip:username@company.com. Such a transition would rely
| on phone companies voluntarily relinquishing their control of
| the address space, spending huge sums of money on training
| customers, to de facto commoditize their service. Every single
| phone with just a number pad would have to be replaced. Hence
| this will not happen.
|
| You can already bypass the PSTN by using Facetime, Signal,
| Whatsapp, etc. But when someone doesn't use the same service or
| doesn't own a smartphone at all, good luck telling them to set
| it up or not contact you at all.
| topranks wrote:
| The 3GPP is 100% bellhead culturally.
|
| Sure they eventually mandated all-IP core, but the overall
| approach still reeks of the old telco, voice-dominated approach.
| They're still trying to resist the idea of the "dumb network".
| gz5 wrote:
| This was more about DNA than protocols.
|
| + Telcos build massive businesses as monopolies in regulated
| enviros. Their budgets, people and processes were built in this
| biome.
|
| + Meanwhile, their services and OSS/BSS were built in the packet-
| switching biome.
|
| Internet was a K-T boundary meteor to this biome. Many telco
| engineers were brilliant. It didn't matter (1) because the DNA of
| the business around them could not adapt fast enough to match the
| speed and execution of the startups which built their DNA in the
| new biome.
|
| (1) at the business and systems level...plenty of tech concepts
| adapted into VoIP concepts..and even at lower levels into H.323,
| SIP and WebRTC).
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > Microsoft no longer has the mental dominance among developers,
| or even a sufficiently significant minority of them, to be able
| to dictate an independently viable culture; instead, they must
| appeal to the crowd to whom UNIX is the normal way of doing
| things.
|
| They don't among developers, but they do among system
| administrators. As far as I can tell, most corporations still run
| on the Microsoft stack (Windows/Exchange/Office/MS365), although
| there is some competition from Google.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| This is true, and with MS Teams gaining popularity I think
| Microsoft has a significant "telecom" presence in the days of
| average users that cannot be ignored.
|
| However, unlike in the early 2000s, a lot of software works
| despite Windows rather than based on Windows. Microsoft's own
| software stack integrates with Windows directly most of the
| time, but if you need something Microsoft doesn't offer, the
| chances of that software using the specific MS APIs are
| significantly lower.
|
| Libraries like OpenSSL have replaced CryptoAPI in many places.
| Video decoding support is nice but why bother learning the MS
| API when you can just plug in FFMPEG. The Windows GUI API makes
| it possible to make incredibly fast, light-weight, and
| responsive applications, but why would you when Qt/Electron are
| right there?
|
| The .NET GUI ecosystem is the last developer space where I
| think Microsoft matters all that much, but even there they're
| losing the battle against team browsers-as-a-GUI-library.
|
| Had Microsoft won then Gmail would be running on Windows Server
| right now. Instead, Azure advertises support for Google's
| Kubernetes product when it comes to attracting customers.
| Between an entire generation growing up with Chromebooks,
| Apple's MDM slowly growing towards feature parity and Microsoft
| starting to move AD and other management features to the cloud,
| I don't know if the monopoly the MS stack holds over business
| will be around for all that long.
|
| With the way things developing, I think Excel (the world's most
| used programmable database that's not a database) will be the
| last standard MS will be able to use for staying relevant, and
| even LibreOffice is good enough to do most people's common
| Excel work these days.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > MS Teams gaining popularity
|
| The [mid sized, ~6000 employees] company I work for just
| switched last week to Teams from Slack. Teams _sucks_. The
| reason it is gaining popularity is that Microsoft basically
| makes it free for companies that are already using things
| like Office 365. Slack couldn 't compete with that, and our
| IT folks don't care about the experience, they are being
| judged strictly on the dollars.
|
| Just add it to the very long list of reductions in quality of
| life we've been subjected to because productivity is
| difficult to quantify as dollars.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I completely agree: Teams is bad. However, it's the best
| piece of software that does what it does. It's an unholy
| Office+Skype+MSN hybrid that integrates incredibly well
| with the systems many sysadmins already use. Chat seems to
| have been added as an afterthought with how many people
| report issues about notifications.
|
| GSuite has similar integration, but it's not as tight. It's
| also equally terrible at least, but in its own different
| ways.
|
| However, I'm not exactly optimistic about Slack either. The
| only good thing about it that I can name is that at least I
| can bridge it to Matrix easily. The frontends for Slack are
| so mediocre that I would consider running an internal
| XMPP/Matrix server before I would recommend Slack to
| anyone. I'd rather have Teams if I had to make a choice
| between the two.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| There are a couple things that Teams hurts my feelings
| on, coming recently from Slack. The biggest one, by far,
| is the terrible Outlook meeting handling. We had a Slack
| plugin that would reliably tell me about meetings before
| they started, give me a link to go directly to the zoom
| call, notify me instantly when I was invited to a new
| meeting and let me decide on the spot if I wanted to
| decline or accept. All within Slack. Great for
| portability.
|
| The other one is notifications. I'm on a Mac, and I have
| no idea why Teams can't make basic notifications work.
| Slack would do the red dot on the icon for non-urgent
| notifications, and then bounce the icon for DMs and
| mentions. Teams will make a noise, but the majority of
| the time it will not reliably even put a notification dot
| on the icon, much less bounce it. Pretty sure it's
| because I have two instances of Teams running on
| different computers, so it gets confused.
|
| I'm back to missing meetings sometimes, unfortunately,
| because Outlook has always been hit-or miss for me on
| meeting reminders. It does not help that I have a 49 inch
| screen so the little pop-up is way off to the right. When
| I'm focused, I can miss that for many minutes. And even
| when I do look in Teams for an Outlook meeting, it
| actually presents the URL for the zoom meeting as plain
| text, not clickable. Sigh. Such a terrible user
| experience.
|
| Slack has warts, too, but Teams feels like state of the
| art from about 10 years ago.
| gumby wrote:
| Microsoft's customers are central IT, not the end users.
|
| This strategy is great and is why windows phone crushed
| apple's attempt with that laughably keyboardless "i phone".
| I expect the same level of success with Teams: users
| universally consider it shit, but they don't pay the bill,
| do they?
| miohtama wrote:
| Microsoft is about to get slapped on bundling its Teams
|
| https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-european-union-
| ant...
| brk wrote:
| Having worked in the telco space, I'm not sure there were ever
| truly "bellheads" and "netheads". It was mostly an industry of
| carriers trying to charge as much as possible, while delivering
| as little as possible. As on example, CallerID cost almost
| nothing to offer, but rather than just make a free convenience
| service, telcos charged ~$10/mo. for you to be able to see data
| that was already present anyway.
|
| As internet connectivity became a standard utility for most
| households, telcos were forced to offer it, or die. Voice-
| specific equipment then became more of a liability than an asset,
| so we saw the networks switch to being primarily IP carriers, and
| voice calls got degraded to using things like SIP out of
| convenience for the carriers.
| bodhiandphysics wrote:
| The distinction was more of a research thing... it was the
| distinction between bell labs' networking efforts and the
| various internet groups, and in some sense very specifically
| between people like Sandy Fraser (who did the research behind
| ATM) and people like Jon Postel. The essential disagreement was
| where intelligence in the network lies... naturally teh
| bellheads (like Sandy) wanted a smart network and dumb
| endpoints, while the netheads (like Postel) wanted a dumb
| network and smart endpoints. I personally think the bellheads
| were right (putting intelligence in the endpoints is why the
| Linux Kernel needs such a massively complicated IP stack), but
| obviously that's not what happened in the real world, perhaps
| for the best.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Arguably, putting the TCP protocol in the Linux kernel is an
| example of bellhead thinking. The machines are now so large
| that in-kernel networking is no longer on the edge.
| Networking in the kernel on a machine with hundreds of CPUs--
| and hundreds of unrelated tenants--amounts to a smart
| network. Putting the network stacks in the user processes,
| and leaving the kernel as a dumb pipe, works better and is
| more aligned with the end-to-end principle.
| bodhiandphysics wrote:
| I think bellhead thinking would be putting the network
| stack on (a possibly virtual!) network card.
| lxgr wrote:
| Since you can never have "fully dumb" endpoints, this model
| requires upgraded end devices to make use of upgraded
| networks, and upgraded networks to enable newer end devices.
| That's an inherent economic disadvantage from the start.
|
| Also, the computational and memory complexity of maintaining
| the state of every existing connection at least at some point
| in the network sounds baffling.
| myself248 wrote:
| > I'm not sure there were ever truly "bellheads" and
| "netheads".
|
| In my experience, I've seen these terms used to refer to
| circuit-switched/deterministic vs packet-switched/opportunistic
| routing.
|
| Bellheads, having done frequency-division and then time-
| division multiplexing, derisively referred to packetized voice
| as "statistical multiplexing" and ridiculed its pathetic jitter
| characteristics. (Radio stations still use ISDN for some things
| because it guarantees latency and jitter performance that
| Ethernet can't.)
|
| Netheads, convinced that when all you have is a hammer,
| everything looks like a packet, said bellheads and their
| obsessions with latency and jitter were stuck in the past.
| Throw enough bandwidth at the problem, was the theory, and it's
| just not a problem anymore. Literally everything that matters
| to anyone could be stuffed into packets, and if that failed to
| meet some QoS requirements, then the requirements were wrong.
| And nobody would care because it'd be so much cheaper.
|
| Ultimately the latter approach seems to have panned out, but
| IMHO, more's the pity. I still miss the imperceptible latency
| of a good old POTS connection. The way we all step on each
| other in Zoom calls today is a special hell we could've
| avoided.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| I very specifically used and heard used around me these exact
| verbatim terms and I can tell you the cultural divide was
| palpable between the two camps one from valley startups another
| from post monopoly AT&T. This influenced decisions on building
| wires all the way up to wan/transmission and standards. The
| Class 5 PSTN approach vs the best effort of VoIP Packet
| switching, IP as Ethernet everywhere vs ATM and Frame Relay
| nailed circuits, the ITU vs the IETF overlaps. H323 vs SIP is a
| perfect example of this tension and in fact the categories
| still exist. H323/Megaco/QSIG et al reference designs are
| precursors of the spaghetti of 5G/IMS etc and SIP is still the
| simplified out of band signaling template for many Web
| protocols.
|
| Back then there was more friction because Internet and Data
| Comms was the new kid on the block basically disrupting a
| fairly established PSTN / Post & Telegraph infrastructure. And
| I say all this as NetHead who had many BellHead friends so it
| never got in the way of going out to lunch together.
| LukeShu wrote:
| I've heard Douglas Comer talk about how he used to get ribbed
| by the Bell Labs guys about "when are you going to come work on
| The Network, instead of that 'internetwork' toy?" There
| definitely was a cultural divide between the two groups, at
| least in the early days.
|
| That said, I'd believe it if someone told me that that people
| kept talking about "bellheads vs netheads" divide long after
| the divide stopped actually existing.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Comer taught at my school and I interned at a company making
| hardware to locate in RBOCs back when local loop unbundling
| was a thing and there definitely was a divide.
|
| The general thought of bellheads was that voip was much lower
| audio quality and that nobody wanted to have to reboot their
| phone.
|
| Both are true, but people got used to lower quality with
| mobile phones, and it's not clear that they ever wanted to
| pay a premium for reliable voice quality, when they can get
| "probably good enough" for substantially cheaper.
| alerighi wrote:
| In my country (Italy) now providers are starting to switch
| users from copper to fibre optic (and thus VOIP) at no extra
| cost. In a couple of years this switch will be mandatory, and
| the copper network will be completely dismantled (as far as I
| know they are already doing that in big cities).
|
| For VDSL services (called also FTTC, fiber to the cabinet and
| then copper to the house) we already switched to VOIP, even if
| in theory both VDSL signal and the old analog signal, since
| it's cheaper to give to the users a router with VOIP integrated
| than do the conversion cabinet side.
| ajb wrote:
| Same in the UK - POTS (plain old telecom services) are being
| withdrawn at the end of 2025, copper will still be used for
| broadband but analogue phone service won't be supplied any
| more. Customers still using analogue phones will be given a
| device capable of converting it to VoIP locally.
| josh2600 wrote:
| This reminds me of the switch from circuits to packet-switched
| networks. Basically what happened is that telco operators only
| wanted to sell circuits which, like a circuit board, were
| essentially a closed loop. This is why t1's were always
| dedicated 1.5mbps symmetrical links that were basically
| unshared bandwidth. You got 1.5mbps because that's what att
| provisioned (until they started over provisioning the
| headend/noc and sold 'shared T1's', but that's a different
| topic).
|
| What happened as I understand the lore is that one year a NANOG
| you had a bunch of young network operators basically get
| together and say "well, we're done with this circuit stuff,
| we're moving to packets where it's a network of routers that
| make decisions about how each chunk of data is moved through
| the network based on headers." The telco operators laughed at
| them because packet routing is much harder to guarantee
| deliverability of data than a circuit and they didn't
| understand why people would want cheaper unreliable data
| routing for their internet service.
|
| Of course, over time, packet routing has won for everyone
| except the largest orgs who have dedicated circuits that aren't
| shared bandwidth. For anyone that's used a direct 10GB fiber
| line that isn't shared vs a cable modem that is overprovisioned
| to hell, the dedicated circuit is a whole different class of
| internet access (and 100-1000x the cost).
|
| SIP vs dedicated trunks is kinda the same thing.
| dboreham wrote:
| They did also sell X.25 (not circuit switched), but generally
| it was not competitive form a price/performance perspective
| with an IP network built from T-1s.
|
| People wanted packet switched service, but found it was
| cheaper/better to build it themselves as an overlay network
| from circuits leased form the telcos.
| mcny wrote:
| > It was mostly an industry of carriers trying to charge as
| much as possible, while delivering as little as possible.
|
| I remember when carriers upped the cost of text message from
| 15c to 25c per message. All four major carriers, iirc, changed
| their pricing within a month of one another. This is another
| service that costs them almost nothing. This is like one of
| those "trout in milk" evidence. I am positive they all got
| together and decided to raise rates but nobody went to prison
| for this collusion.
|
| I mean I wouldn't have minded if they only charged for messages
| sent but they charged me for incoming messages as well. My
| friends had unlimited texting and as a poor college student I
| was trying to save money. I was so glad when
| grandcentral/google voice became available. I joined it and
| never looked back.
| topranks wrote:
| There absolutely were.
|
| In the early 90s the telco guys were sure ATM was the true way,
| and IP was just gonna die off as it gained adoption.
| mhandley wrote:
| [SIP author here, for better or worse] SIP's victory over H.323
| was definitely an odd story. Henning Schulzrinne wrote a draft
| called SCIP, which was essentially HTTP for multimedia calling.
| SCIP overlapped with what Eve Schooler and I were already doing.
| We thought his version was too complicated (ha!), so I rushed out
| a draft based on what I had been coding in the MBone session
| directory sdr, which was a simpler UDP-based SIP. We presented
| them both at the same IETF meeting in 1997 where I was already
| standardizing SDP, and got general support from the room, but the
| main message we took home was there can be only one! So we met up
| at Columbia a month later and spent a day arguing out which
| features of the two protocols to keep. The resulting protocol is
| the basis of the SIP we know today.
|
| By this time, H.323 was gaining lots of momentum and Microsoft
| and Intel had adopted it. What chance for a few academics against
| Microsoft and Intel? But I was chairing the MMUSIC WG in the IETF
| and, quite simply, no-one told us to stop. So with the hubris of
| youth, we just carried on anyway. Loads of people told us we
| couldn't possibly win, but H.323 was just too ugly and telco-
| like, and (in the early versions) took so many round trip times
| to do anything at all, that we really didn't like it.
|
| Around this time it started to occur to some of the telcos that
| Internet traffic would before long exceed phone traffic, and it
| would then make no sense to run two networks. In particular Henry
| Sinnreich at Internet MCI started to look around for what they
| should do, and he thought SIP's proxy architecture would fit
| their needs better than H.323. As a result I went down to Dallas
| and gave a couple of days tutorial to all the Internet MCI folks
| about how we saw IP-based internet multimedia working out. After
| that, Internet MCI started to push SIP, and other telcos noticed.
| Increasingly it seemed our main allies were telcos. And so it
| turned out that in the early VoIP space, telcos held more sway
| than Microsoft and Intel. Eventually Microsoft moved to SIP too.
| The downside was that SIP rapidly accumulated lots of telco
| cruft, and the original peer-to-peer email-address-based nature
| of SIP wasn't what actually took off.
|
| So, H.323 came from bell-heads, but got backed by net-heads. SIP
| came from a few net-head academics, but got backed by bell-heads.
| In the end, for better or worse, the latter won. Ever since an
| IETF meeting around 2000 where there was more than 100 SIP-based
| internet drafts, I've regarded SIP as being my success disaster.
| It's a huge success, but it could have been so much simpler and
| cleaner.
| Aloha wrote:
| SIP has crept into so many spots -
|
| Need to connect two two-way radio systems? its SIP in a fancy
| dress.
|
| Need to connect a two-way to a console system? its SIP in a
| different colored fancy dress.
|
| NXDN is completely SIP internally, it's not standard SIP, but
| you can still construct a call ladder with conventional tools
| (or just read the captures), and have a rough idea of what it's
| doing, even if the headers are weird. P25, and DMR use SIP in
| various other places, either for logging, or for console
| connections. The workaround so you have Calling Party ID on
| radio systems is to imbed the metadata for a talkspurt inside
| the audio stream.
|
| The one gripe I have about SIP, is - I _suspect_ mostly because
| (but not entirely) of the telco cruft, you can have two
| standards compliant SIP implementations that can 't interop in
| a meaningful way.
|
| The lack of a required minimum codec support does add to those
| challenges, but I've seen SIP also fail to work even when both
| sides have the same codecs, but rather do not emit headers the
| other side expects. (For example when OPTIONS must occur before
| REGISTER)
|
| Gripes aside, I will take a SIP derived protocol any day over a
| binary protocol that needs some sort of magic decoder ring, I
| have to work with those, and I loathe them for obvious reasons.
| So thank you for the work you did to standardize something that
| has touched my daily working life for 15 years now.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Simplex SIP is so frustrating coming from my debut in the tech
| stack as a helpdesk grunt installing, punching down, toning out -
| analog
|
| Voip is best effort and it sucks to talk over each other
|
| Analog is an actual circuit that completes, not this width washy
| best effort internet crap AND the kicker is I can talk over
| people and they shut up fast.
|
| I'm not a big fan of what has happened to telephones.
|
| Preferred the legacy on premises SIP PBX I was sold 72 or 80
| months ago. The cloud hosted bullshit powered by session border
| controllers needs to stop.
|
| Finally made the swap to cloud PBX and it absolutely sucks ass
| looking at you Spectrum Enterprise
| bitwize wrote:
| Bellheads gave us a network that was almost perfectly reliable,
| with latency as close to zero as the propagation of electrons
| through a wire (or light through a pipe) would allow.
|
| Netheads fucked that all up.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Lol. No.
|
| Government regulation gave you that - it was the price the
| company had to pay for a monopoly, driven by utility
| commissions.
|
| I had to take an escalation on-call shift today. I'm sitting on
| top of a ski mountain right now, outside, on HN waiting for my
| family after dealing with a problem. Network latency didn't
| even enter into my mind in the last month.
|
| In the Bellhead world I'd be sitting in my living room chained
| to the phone or on a $200/mo phone from my employer close to
| home. Making our modern technology stack wouldn't have
| represented the best return on assets for AT&T and its
| successor Bell companies. Why would you deliver 500 Mbps
| service to a mountain?
| tormeh wrote:
| Cost is king.
| supertrope wrote:
| People generally prefer an 80% functionality solution at 50%
| cost. Hence MP3 music downloads at 128 Kbps, the same
| smartphone optimized layout being reused as the desktop
| website, and Electron apps.
| msla wrote:
| Bellheads gave us a network controlled by a centralized
| organization.
|
| Netheads gave us networks controlled at the edges, and
| responsive to the users.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Except that's not what actually happened.
|
| If you look at the web, it's very much centralized today.
| msla wrote:
| > If you look at the web, it's very much centralized today.
|
| It's diagnostic that, in order to make your point, you have
| to:
|
| 1. Conflate the Internet with the World Wide Web
|
| 2. Conflate the World Wide Web with the portion of it
| hosted on the few largest platforms
|
| 3. Refuse to see anything beyond that narrow section of the
| Internet
| tristor wrote:
| > If you look at the web, it's very much centralized today.
|
| The web is not the network. The network, the Internet, is a
| collection of decentralized networks peering with one
| another. There are nearly 90000 ASNs in use, each of which
| represents one or more networks controlled by a single
| entity, routed globally via BGP.
|
| I don't know about you, but nearly 90000 entities does not
| sound very centralized to me.
|
| Your average user will transit at minimum 3 networks to
| reach any given website. The network of their ISP, the
| network of at least one transit ISP, and the network of the
| host for that site (which may also be the destination). As
| peering relationships for some host networks like Netflix,
| Google, Facebook, and AWS get deeper, it's possible that
| they may not need a transit ISP to connect your ISP into
| their host network. That said, with the exception of Google
| Fiber customers (which is anyway still in a separate ASN),
| your ISP and the destination are separate and are inter-
| networked in a distributed fashion.
|
| While the "web" is relatively centralized (although has a
| /very/ long tail), the networks that underlay it are not.
| icedchai wrote:
| It's actually incredible how accessible BGP is these
| days. Anyone can get their own "personal" ASN. Try a RIPE
| LIR even if you're outside Europe, it's easier and
| cheaper than dealing with ARIN in the US. They'll require
| you to have a European presence (a VPS counts!) You can
| then peer with various providers all over the place
| (either VPS or dedicated), use your IPs there, or tunnel
| your connectivity back to where ever you want.
| hlandau wrote:
| Author here.
|
| Honestly, this is true. In some ways, it reminds me of grow up
| technologies v. grow down technologies [1]; the highly-reliable
| high-cost technologies ("groow-down" technologies) tend to get
| out-competed by cheaper and less reliable but good enough
| technologies ("grow-up" technologies). After those technologies
| win, the need for the high reliability of the grow-down
| technologies still exists for some use cases, so the grow-up
| technology tends to have facilities to allow it to attain that
| level of reliability tacked on. This generally seems to get the
| grow-up technology almost, _but not quite_, to the original
| level of reliability of the grow-down technology. The IP
| version of this for VoIP is "use a private network, carrier
| hotels, QoS", etc.
|
| On all aspects but reliability I don't see much to advocate for
| in the PSTN though. The lack of separation between the network
| and the applications running over it is particularly awful (the
| modern materialisation of this issue is that you might be able
| to call number X, but not SMS it, or vice versa, because the
| way these different applications are transported and routed is
| my knowledge completely different.) We saw what the telco
| conception of networking looked like with things like ISDN or
| X.25. I'm pretty happy that vision didn't win.
|
| [1] http://www.devever.net/~hl/growupdown
| toast0 wrote:
| > On all aspects but reliability I don't see much to advocate
| for in the PSTN though.
|
| VOIP latency is significantly worse too. Reliability is good
| enough, IMHO, but I think most people are using 20ms samples
| and two samples per packet, which is 40ms behind, plus a
| jitter buffer, etc. On the plus side, nethead routing may be
| using better routes than bellhead, but that's probably only
| saving 10ms (if that) on trip from one coast to the other.
| supertrope wrote:
| Like digital TV having a channel switch delay there's some
| inherent delay to VoIP. It's not noticeable if it's
| designed correctly. The wheels come off when there's way
| too many hops and layers and best practices are not
| followed. For example a customer has their cellphone on
| speakerphone in a weak signal area while driving, and the
| employee is using an in-browser softphone on VPN on Wi-Fi
| on cable Internet. That's when you get 500 ms of delay
| that's like satellite.
| hlandau wrote:
| This is a good point. Latency tends to be the Achilles heel
| of any digital technology not specifically designed to keep
| latency low. In true "grow-up" vein Ethernet has had to try
| and improve in this regard with TSN, etc. The IETF also has
| a 'deterministic networking' WG.
|
| You can find all sorts of dead interconnect technologies
| which genuinely offered better latency/jitter/etc. than
| grow-up technologies like Ethernet or USB, like Fibre
| Channel or Firewire. Interestingly if you go digging, there
| was once some specification for using Fibre Channel for
| audio/video transmission... wonder if anyone still has any
| of that equipment lying around. It's pretty sad how these
| things die off when they can offer superior performance,
| but it seems to end up just not being better _enough_.
|
| VoIP latency is definitely a pity. My guess is we could
| probably improve the situation with specialised codecs
| which focus on latency rather than bandwidth efficiency,
| but I can't imagine ever beating the latency of TDM. The
| synchronicity of TDM networks is certainly one of the more
| interesting aspects of them; you can read a book about
| T1/E1 now and be struck by the synchronicity of it all
| relative to Ethernet. To my knowledge a major motivation
| for Ethernet's TSN extensions is to allow clock signals to
| be reliably propagated to cell carrier hardware which is
| switching from T/E-carriers to Ethernet, and which is
| accustomed to being able to transfer not just data but a
| clock reference via their uplinks.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > dead interconnect technologies which genuinely offered
| better latency/jitter/etc
|
| Betamax effect: technically superior, but it turns out
| that's not what the customers actually care about.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Betamax was technically _inferior_ in one way that
| mattered quite a lot.
|
| VHS could play a two-hour movie with a single cassette
| right from the start. Betamax at the time was limited to
| one hour, so anyone who bought or rented a typical movie
| of more than one hour but less than two had to switch
| cassettes midway through. VHS could play the whole thing
| in one go.
|
| Even for the rare movie that was more than two hours,
| this meant two VHS cassettes vs. _three_ Betamax
| cassettes.
|
| Betamax II and III were introduced later, with longer
| running times due to slower tape speed (and lower
| quality), but these were too late to the party.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Competition_with_Betama
| x
| ipython wrote:
| Agreed. On top of that, "netheads" also brought incessant spam
| to the system, which will ultimately lead to its demise.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'd much rather deal with the occasional spam message than
| having monopolies charge everyone through their nose per the
| kilobyte and deciding which applications are dignified enough
| to even make it onto their shiny network.
|
| Also, ironically, the only spam I get these days is via text
| or robocalls.
|
| I'd gladly get rid of my phone number altogether, if it
| wasn't for businesses insisting on using it as a primary user
| identifier, verification method, and communications channel.
| [deleted]
| pjc50 wrote:
| The "Bellhead" network was a machine for extracting as much
| surplus value as possible while preventing unlicensed
| innovation. The internet let people invent services without
| having to pay the monopolist.
|
| (see upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558663)
|
| A similar thing played out with smartphones; telcos wanted to
| capture the entire value, until they were outcompeted by
| _Apple_ capturing all (or at least 30%) of the value through
| the app store instead.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Hey, Muad'dib said the one can fuck something up is the true
| owner of that thing. Or something like that. Anyway the
| bellheads lost.
| oaiey wrote:
| Take my upvote ;)
| oynqr wrote:
| Alright, the bellheads are Corrino, netheads Atreides, but
| who is Harkonnen?
| sneak wrote:
| Cable companies.
| rglullis wrote:
| > Voice calling between domains without prior contractual
| relationship, as is the case for email, is nowhere in sight.
|
| This is exactly one of the things that I tried to build first
| with Communick after my time working at Deutsche Telekom. They
| spent so much time and money building products around the idea of
| letting people buy DIDs, or to let people continue pretending
| that they care about their phone number, and I was there asking
| "why don't we just provide voice call by SIP and let people
| create their own addresses? Then you could get customers even
| from competing phone companies."
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| When was this published? O, it is on their homepage. January 27th
| 2023.
| sp332 wrote:
| There is a table of contents here https://www.devever.net/~hl/
| This is the most recent post, and the date there matches the
| bottom of the page (January 27, 2023).
| thomasjudge wrote:
| Methinks the "cultural defeat of Microsoft" is greatly
| exaggerated...
| oaiey wrote:
| The Microsoft paragraph was pointless and wrong in many places.
| NT as a cross over of DOS and VMS? It is more that the VMS tech
| virtualized DOS like a good VMS stack at that time did with
| many things (as did NT with POSIX, win32 and OS/2) and below
| Intel, MIPS, alpha and whatever the forth was.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Probably 95% of businesses and 99% of businesses with >200
| employees use O365. They aren't going anywhere except to move
| more services to Microsoft cloud.
|
| I'd like to be defeated like that. Lol.
| nayuki wrote:
| The "netheads vs. bellheads" war is captured in "Rise of the
| Stupid Network" by David Isenberg:
| https://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html
| greatgib wrote:
| In my opinion, it is very important to remember what the "net
| neutrality" regulations gave us in term of progress when you
| remember the fight at that time and lobbyists pretending very
| convincingly that it would hinder innovation and have all actors
| to go into bankruptcy!
| fieldcny wrote:
| It's way to early to declare victory against the business model
| where you pay extra for different services to the network.
|
| As soon as the networks can re-assert their power they will, they
| still own the network. The companies that need the network have
| lost their collective hold on the psyche of Americans.
|
| There are so many streaming services now it's worse than cable,
| no one will care if Verizon takes a chunk of Netflix's revenue.
| jpmattia wrote:
| > _Indeed, the only thing that remains "circuit switched" about
| the PSTN today is the per-minute billing model -- based on telcos
| mutually pretending to one another that they 're still operating
| a circuit switched network that justifies this kind of billing._
|
| When was this published?
|
| The reason I ask: I sat through biz meetings at Bell Labs in the
| late 90s, back when long-distance calls were still being billed
| on a per-minute basis, and the market price was approaching
| $0.05/minute. This was a big deal because the cost to bill per
| minute (all the tracking and back-end collection work) also
| worked out to about $0.05/minute, so it was clear that per-minute
| billing was going away by y2k.
|
| So I'm a little amazed that per-minute billing is still viable
| more than two decades later.
|
| Edit: It makes me wonder if the author is confusing "usage"
| billing (use measured in minutes) with "per-minute" billing (an
| itemized list of call times and phone number destinations.)
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ..."a little amazed that per-minute billing is still viable
| more than two decades later."
|
| I'm not so amazed....the anser tends to be: because they can.
| That is, because they can charge someone, and those someones
| either don't know better and pay, or are not given a choice and
| must pay. I guess I could have just replied with something
| like: Because capitalism....but now i'm not sure which sounds
| worse/sadder for society. :-(
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Most cell plans (in the US), excluding pay-as-you-go, offer
| unlimited call and text, optioning to charge for data instead
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I wonder how much bandwidth we can squeeze out of a phone
| call. If only there were some technology for transmitting
| data via sound...
| Karellen wrote:
| Interesting idea. You'd need some kind of system to
| modulate the sound wave to carry the data, and then
| demodulate it at the other end to get the data back out.
|
| It's a long shot, but it might just work...
| miohtama wrote:
| On 4G "mobile call" you get 8 kpbs - 64 kbps for the voice.
|
| > In fact, VoIP over 4G actually offers higher call quality
| than standard mobile calling. Mobile calling compresses
| voice to about 8 Kbps, while VoIP calls can use up to 64
| Kbps with a professional provider such as IDT. Instead of
| the 'tinny' voice typical of mobile calls, clients called
| from VoIP on 4G will hear you clearly.
|
| https://www.idtexpress.com/blog/difference-3g-4g-voip-
| calls/
| cowmix wrote:
| Always good to listen to this...
|
| https://town.hall.org/radio/HellsBells/
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