I often mention that the general philosophy of telephone engineers is "hilariously complicated." But of course that's a bit unfair, there are good reasons telec

I often mention that the general philosophy of telephone engineers is "hilariously complicated." But of course that's a bit unfair, there are good reasons telecoms people did things the way they did. It's important to understanding modern computer networks, I think, to observe that reliability and proactive traffic engineering were top priorities for the telecom industry but to a large extent an afterthought in the computing industry. Traffic engineering especially, management of overloaded links and etc, is often an "emergent property" of computer networks, while it was very much by intention in the telephone network where link reservation and etc. are common practices. As computer users, every day we live with the pros and cons of this difference in philosophy. Our network links are much faster but much less reliable than they would be had, e.g. the ISDN vision which I've mentioned before on computer.rip gained more traction. For a long time applications like video conferencing and newsgathering stuck to ISDN rather than the internet because of the "cons" in the tradeoff. You imagine a world where, say, an online video stopping to buffer is as rare as a kernel panic, but you've also got to check if your internet subscription covers a reservation of that size. Come judgment day I think there is guilt on both sides, telecom people broadly did not foresee the huge capabilities of "opportunistic" (e.g. contentious) network utilization, but computer people broadly did not foresee the demands of real-time media over computer networks. Despite AT&T's dedicated but haphazard efforts through US vs. AT&T, the telephone industry did not gain serious traction in the nascent world of computers, and then computers took over telecom, and so we all just sort of live in the world of contentious networking now and it's hard to imagine it a different way.