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It's surprising that telecommunications and Internet still haven't fully merged into a single service. These days I don't even buy phone credit anymore. I jus

• busterarm 10y ago
  The folks old/experienced enough to know better are basically all retired and for various reasons don't care. On the phone side of things, they generally all retired with great pensions/retirement plans and never had to get too deep in the computer side of things. On the computer side of things, their packet-switched networks had different enough requirements from circuit-switched that it evolved separately and who wanted to deal with all that regulation anyway? There's still a fair bit of overlap between internet routing protocols and telephone routing (and even postal routing). Now that content and deliverability requirements have changed for Internet users, we're having to solve old problems again and the infrastructure is becoming more the same. All the recent work and talk about new transport protocols for VoIP? Guess what... Just about all of your TelCos basically had voip in their infrastructure back in the mid-90s and nobody noticed the difference. Your PSTN lines connected to your local and and they connected to each other via IP to share lines (and massively save costs). Look up FXO/FXS gateways if you're interested. Some of you have this in your homes on a small scale.