6 ms·

It's been years since I read that book, but the one thing that surprised me the most was how much the phone companies didn't believe in packet switching. They

It's been years since I read that book, but the one thing that surprised me the most was how much the phone companies didn't believe in packet switching. They thought anything that wasn't connection oriented was nonsense. The internet basically grew in spite of the established telcos, not thru them. Around the same time as the book, Wired had an article "Netheads vs Bellheads" [1] which covers the same tension. It's interesting to read an article from a time when it was accepted knowledge that ATM was the future of the internet, and it was newsworthy that a few heretics thought otherwise. [1] https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/ https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

emmelaich 8y ago
For those wondering what a reference to an "IPhone" is doing in a story from 1996 -- it's referring to the Infogear/Cisco/Linksys IPhone; a VOIP product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone
myself248 8y ago
> phone companies didn't believe in packet switching. Sure didn't. It's a terrible way to treat voice calls, and as far as the phone company was concerned, voice was the only thing. Data could ride a voice-grade connection just fine, but voice suffered badly when "statistically multiplexed", a term used (oft derisively) to refer to packetization. This is still true, by the way. Radio studios still use ISDN links to other studios, because they have fixed latency and incredibly low jitter. Customers have gotten used to the latency of digital mobile phones, but some of us still remember the truly simultaneous conversation of a landline or analog cellphone. (I remember the rollout of digital, and the... and the con.... go ahead.... no, you go ahead... okay, the confusion as people were just learning to converse with a delay on the line.) It just turned out that cheaper capacity was more important. ATM was always a dead-end, though. I think a lot of people knew that even as it was being deployed. If you're packetizing anyway, you might as well throw QoS right out the window and embrace nondeterminism wholeheartedly. It's cheaper, and that writing was already on the wall. Quality had been the mantra for the first hundred years of the Bell system, but deregulation and competition allowed the almighty dollar to prevail over every other concern. Enjoy the jitter!
- ghaff 8y ago
  In a lot of ways, modern voice calls-whether video or just voice-suck in comparison to old landline Ma Bell landline calls. It’s mostly a reasonable tradeoff but I had a hell of a lot fewer dropped calls in the old days.
  - ricardobeat 8y ago
    You also had zero calls outside your house, in the car, or on the go :)
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Hence "mostly a reasonable tradeoff." Even many of us who were adults pre-cell phones tend to forget just how tethered to landlines we often were. But we also mostly weren't yelling "Can you hear me NOW??" into our handsets.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  > "Data could ride a voice-grade connection just..." Perhaps this mindset was true at the AT&T / (eventual) RBOC level but at the R&D level I believe the story was different. My father worked for Western Electric. For those who don't already know, WE's role was to take Bell Labs "raw" R&D and make it work commercially. In any case, when I was a pre-teen / teen (think early to mid 70's, if my memory serves me correctly) I remember going to an annual open house (for family members) an seeing demos on fiber optics. Maybe the plan was to use fiber strictly for voice, but that feels odd to me. p.s. Fwiw my father actually worked on a technology that then competed with fiber. As we know now, fiber won. My point is, there was a sense somewhere that additional capacity was necessary. That amount of investment for the growth of voice might be possible, but I don't think so.
  - wmf 8y ago
    Yes, I get the impression that the plan until ATM came along was to build exclusively circuit-based networks with most of the circuits used for voice and some for data.
contingencies 8y ago
Technological progress was much faster than political progress. - Joseph Henry Condon, Bell Labs A generation before, with the telephone: This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. What use could this company make of an electrical toy? - Western Union (1878) Two generations before, with printing: The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter. - Thomas Hobbes (17th century) Thus... A little bit of history, repeating... - Alex Gifford (1997) .. via http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
- schoen 8y ago
  I think Hobbes is right there, if you include the "compared with the invention of letters" part of his sentiment. Writing as a whole is a more difficult, more consequential, and more culturally challenging invention than printing (even though printing is definitely all three of those things). Before print (and after it but not yet relying on it) we had literacy, schools, mathematics, written personal and scientific correspondence, accounting, and to some extent written legislation and written accounts of legal and governmental decisions. All of those things were definitely expensive and largely elite phenomena in many places, but they were all real and had enormous impacts. People today still avidly study sacred texts that were written down hundreds and even thousands of years before the advent of printing, as well as history and literature from the same timeframe. Thomas Hobbes had his own works printed during his lifetime, so I don't think he meant to suggest that printing was a useless curiosity. You can probably find much more naive and categorical dismissals of printing from around that time. :-) (Also, I think you might mean "century" rather than "generation".)
  - contingencies 8y ago
    Agreed. Also prior to writing there was also folklore, which was surprisingly accurate: there have been many major events from folklore verified by science (earthquakes, astrological events, extreme weather / floods, etc.) IIRC in some cases (Australian aborigines) well over 5,000 years ago (they have been in Australia for 60,000 years!). FWIW I meant generation in the sense of a generation of communications technology, rather than a human. Who measures in human lifespans these days? Hehe.
jgrahamc 8y ago
I worked on code, protocols and a chipset for ATM and it was very, very quickly obvious that in the LAN environment ATM LANE was a total mess and the supposed driver for LAN ATM was desktop video conferencing which "required" QoS. At the time the competing LAN technolgies were 10Mbps Ethernet and 16Mbps token ring. What became very, very obvious was that 100Mbps Ethernet with switches was doing to win because... known technology (for IT departments), same cabling. I was just a peon but watching upper management talk about ATM being the future was very instructive: they weren't close to customers. You might enjoy this 1996 presentation from my old employer: https://www.slideshare.net/redpineapple/atm-sales-from-madge-networks https://www.slideshare.net/redpineapple/atm-sales-from-madge...

emmelaich 8y ago

For those wondering what a reference to an "IPhone" is doing in a story from 1996 -- it's referring to the Infogear/Cisco/Linksys IPhone; a VOIP product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone

myself248 8y ago

> phone companies didn't believe in packet switching. Sure didn't. It's a terrible way to treat voice calls, and as far as the phone company was concerned, voice was the only thing. Data could ride a voice-grade connection just fine, but voice suffered badly when "statistically multiplexed", a term used (oft derisively) to refer to packetization. This is still true, by the way. Radio studios still use ISDN links to other studios, because they have fixed latency and incredibly low jitter. Customers have gotten used to the latency of digital mobile phones, but some of us still remember the truly simultaneous conversation of a landline or analog cellphone. (I remember the rollout of digital, and the... and the con.... go ahead.... no, you go ahead... okay, the confusion as people were just learning to converse with a delay on the line.) It just turned out that cheaper capacity was more important. ATM was always a dead-end, though. I think a lot of people knew that even as it was being deployed. If you're packetizing anyway, you might as well throw QoS right out the window and embrace nondeterminism wholeheartedly. It's cheaper, and that writing was already on the wall. Quality had been the mantra for the first hundred years of the Bell system, but deregulation and competition allowed the almighty dollar to prevail over every other concern. Enjoy the jitter!

ghaff 8y ago
In a lot of ways, modern voice calls-whether video or just voice-suck in comparison to old landline Ma Bell landline calls. It’s mostly a reasonable tradeoff but I had a hell of a lot fewer dropped calls in the old days.
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  You also had zero calls outside your house, in the car, or on the go :)
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Hence "mostly a reasonable tradeoff." Even many of us who were adults pre-cell phones tend to forget just how tethered to landlines we often were. But we also mostly weren't yelling "Can you hear me NOW??" into our handsets.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
> "Data could ride a voice-grade connection just..." Perhaps this mindset was true at the AT&T / (eventual) RBOC level but at the R&D level I believe the story was different. My father worked for Western Electric. For those who don't already know, WE's role was to take Bell Labs "raw" R&D and make it work commercially. In any case, when I was a pre-teen / teen (think early to mid 70's, if my memory serves me correctly) I remember going to an annual open house (for family members) an seeing demos on fiber optics. Maybe the plan was to use fiber strictly for voice, but that feels odd to me. p.s. Fwiw my father actually worked on a technology that then competed with fiber. As we know now, fiber won. My point is, there was a sense somewhere that additional capacity was necessary. That amount of investment for the growth of voice might be possible, but I don't think so.
- wmf 8y ago
  Yes, I get the impression that the plan until ATM came along was to build exclusively circuit-based networks with most of the circuits used for voice and some for data.

contingencies 8y ago

Technological progress was much faster than political progress. - Joseph Henry Condon, Bell Labs A generation before, with the telephone: This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. What use could this company make of an electrical toy? - Western Union (1878) Two generations before, with printing: The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter. - Thomas Hobbes (17th century) Thus... A little bit of history, repeating... - Alex Gifford (1997) .. via http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

schoen 8y ago
I think Hobbes is right there, if you include the "compared with the invention of letters" part of his sentiment. Writing as a whole is a more difficult, more consequential, and more culturally challenging invention than printing (even though printing is definitely all three of those things). Before print (and after it but not yet relying on it) we had literacy, schools, mathematics, written personal and scientific correspondence, accounting, and to some extent written legislation and written accounts of legal and governmental decisions. All of those things were definitely expensive and largely elite phenomena in many places, but they were all real and had enormous impacts. People today still avidly study sacred texts that were written down hundreds and even thousands of years before the advent of printing, as well as history and literature from the same timeframe. Thomas Hobbes had his own works printed during his lifetime, so I don't think he meant to suggest that printing was a useless curiosity. You can probably find much more naive and categorical dismissals of printing from around that time. :-) (Also, I think you might mean "century" rather than "generation".)
- contingencies 8y ago
  Agreed. Also prior to writing there was also folklore, which was surprisingly accurate: there have been many major events from folklore verified by science (earthquakes, astrological events, extreme weather / floods, etc.) IIRC in some cases (Australian aborigines) well over 5,000 years ago (they have been in Australia for 60,000 years!). FWIW I meant generation in the sense of a generation of communications technology, rather than a human. Who measures in human lifespans these days? Hehe.

jgrahamc 8y ago

I worked on code, protocols and a chipset for ATM and it was very, very quickly obvious that in the LAN environment ATM LANE was a total mess and the supposed driver for LAN ATM was desktop video conferencing which "required" QoS. At the time the competing LAN technolgies were 10Mbps Ethernet and 16Mbps token ring. What became very, very obvious was that 100Mbps Ethernet with switches was doing to win because... known technology (for IT departments), same cabling. I was just a peon but watching upper management talk about ATM being the future was very instructive: they weren't close to customers. You might enjoy this 1996 presentation from my old employer: https://www.slideshare.net/redpineapple/atm-sales-from-madge-networks https://www.slideshare.net/redpineapple/atm-sales-from-madge...