These old ESS switches are currently being retired en masse in favor of packet-based softswitches. For example, see the Verizon network disclosures page [1]. Every listing for "Planned Network Change" or "Switch Retirement" is another 5ESS or DMS100 being ripped out.
The holiday bombing in Nashville provided clear evidence of what we've lost in terms of PSTN resiliency. I don't think there would have been region-wide loss of service for greater than 24 hours in say 1994.
Who cares about reliability, it is not as if lives depend on it. /s
If I look at the availability of phone service in my home (German metro area, cable) it is way below anyone would gave dared to provide in the TDM/ISDN times. I strongly believe only the redundancies people have with also having a mobile phone has allowed this to continue with lives being lost and regulators clamping down.
Yeah, but also in an era of vastly less inter city capacity for long haul. Properly implemented Opus on a network with under 1% packet loss sounds great.
Not quite - there are a bunch of CS2K retirements listed there, which was the soft switch evolution of the DMS100. I'm personally a little sad about those retirements as my first professional job was on the small team at Nortel developing the prototype of a DMS100 call server controlling a packet switch fabric. We started with ATM but moved to Ethernet when it became clear that was going to be the packet fabric of choice. Still, it's had a good innings and they were fun times.
I hadn't heard the name Nortel in a long time - I used to work for a company that had a lot of Nortel phone switches. Wikipedia says that they're now defunct, which makes me a little sad.
sneak|4 years ago
Kids these days will never know how great phones worked in the 80s and 90s. Fuck.
Give me that circuit switched reliability over high res audio with occasional/intermittent/unavoidable packet loss and jitter any day of the week.
dayofthedaleks|4 years ago
heisenbit|4 years ago
If I look at the availability of phone service in my home (German metro area, cable) it is way below anyone would gave dared to provide in the TDM/ISDN times. I strongly believe only the redundancies people have with also having a mobile phone has allowed this to continue with lives being lost and regulators clamping down.
walrus01|4 years ago
timthorn|4 years ago
larrywright|4 years ago