4 ms·

Just wanna add one thing I've not seen below: telco is heavily regulated, so you definitely need to get a lawyer to either guide you thru the minefield, eg know

Just wanna add one thing I've not seen below: telco is heavily regulated, so you definitely need to get a lawyer to either guide you thru the minefield, eg know exactly what phrases and service offerings stay on the less-regulated side of the law and which dont. Not all regs are bad (eg anyone can call 911, anywhere, and the network must figure out where they are) but its not for the faint hearted, and some might argue that the big telcos like it like that. Also, if you are going to do anything with voice, public cloud may not cut it. The reliability bar for voice services is insanely high. Sub 10ms failover between elements while preserving the voice media stream type of stuff. Five or six nines availability, or else the regulator beats the shi* out of you. This is not an outage model where your COO can put out a chatty tweet saying "sorry and heres a $10 credit."

muttantt 4y ago
> Also, if you are going to do anything with voice, public cloud may not cut it. Non sense. I run a very successful over-the-top VOIP provider using commodity dedicated servers in multiple states, some even on Digital Ocean. Essentially no issues related to connectivity, be it business customers or residentials.
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  Interesting! Do you process RTP media in your instances? If so, and you can share, how do you do fast failover between instances without loss of the media stream? Im not familiar with DO but on the big 3, none of them can do IP address failover via L2 GARP because of how their fabric works, and doing it at L3 with say BGP is waaaay too slow.
elchief 4y ago
> Five or six nines availability Post is about telecom service that was down for a whole day
bcrl 4y ago
At least in Canada, you can't afford the lawyers that have regulatory experience and are good enough to win. They're already employed by the large ILECs. Or they don't know how to strategize and win at the 5d chess games the incumbents are playing to win for the long term. TekSavvy and CNOC played right into the goals of Bell with disaggregated. They tried to address their number one cost of capacity charges on last mile aggregated DSL networks (which were north of $10 per megabit) and asked for disaggregated to eliminate that cost. Bell saw that as a oppourtunity to load a whole bunch of costs into provisioning of disaggregated and ended up with several orders of magnitude higher costs for wholesale ISPs. Aggregated setup costs were about $10-15k for all of Ontario and Quebec. Disaggregated costs $50-150k per CO and would cost hundreds of millions to setup across all of Ontario and Quebec. Since FTTH is tied to disaggregated, Teksavvy has basically lost a large chunk of its market by backing the wrong horse. There are maybe a few dozen people across Canada that truly understand what's going on in the Canadian telecom regulatory world. More people need to educate themselves about what's going on and ask the CRTC to improve the major pain points holding back independent providers.
- ShroudedNight 4y ago
  To your last paragraph, how does one adequately educate oneself to advocate effectively at the CRTC if the ranks of those truly in the know are so small and inaccessible (seemingly by design)?
  - bcrl 4y ago
    It's not by design so much as a result of limited participation by the general public. Proceedings are posted to the CRTC's website and are available for anyone to view and comment on. When it comes to information that the CRTC considers in its decisions, as the CRTC functions quite similarly to a court: they will not consider evidence that is not presented to its version of the public record. Unless the general public submits their comments to proceedings, the comments tend to be limited to the views of carriers and a few public interest advocacy bodies. Stories published in the media, on blogs or elsewhere will not be considered unless someone submits them to the CRTC's record, even though they may be readily access to the CRTC. This becomes quite important when there is locally relevant information that the commission is not aware of, or if there are business practices that the commission should be made aware of. People need to complain when their choice of internet providers is limited or if incumbents increase prices twice a year. If nobody raises these issues at the CRTC, nothing will change.
oogali 4y ago
And if you are going to do anything with voice, you are mandated to connect to the ILEC’s interconnection points (also known as tandems) for exchanging local traffic (as well as negotiating a new interconnection agreement or opting into an existing one). You are also required to connect to all of your region’s 911 interconnection points (also known as public safety access points, abbreviated as PSAPs) which are distinctly different than the aforementioned interconnection points. Finally, if you have an outage over 30 minutes in the US, in most cases, you are required to report that to the FCC within 2 hours of the event, then submit a final post-mortem within 30 days. Voice is no joke.

muttantt 4y ago

> Also, if you are going to do anything with voice, public cloud may not cut it. Non sense. I run a very successful over-the-top VOIP provider using commodity dedicated servers in multiple states, some even on Digital Ocean. Essentially no issues related to connectivity, be it business customers or residentials.

kjellsbells 4y ago
Interesting! Do you process RTP media in your instances? If so, and you can share, how do you do fast failover between instances without loss of the media stream? Im not familiar with DO but on the big 3, none of them can do IP address failover via L2 GARP because of how their fabric works, and doing it at L3 with say BGP is waaaay too slow.

elchief 4y ago

> Five or six nines availability Post is about telecom service that was down for a whole day

bcrl 4y ago

At least in Canada, you can't afford the lawyers that have regulatory experience and are good enough to win. They're already employed by the large ILECs. Or they don't know how to strategize and win at the 5d chess games the incumbents are playing to win for the long term. TekSavvy and CNOC played right into the goals of Bell with disaggregated. They tried to address their number one cost of capacity charges on last mile aggregated DSL networks (which were north of $10 per megabit) and asked for disaggregated to eliminate that cost. Bell saw that as a oppourtunity to load a whole bunch of costs into provisioning of disaggregated and ended up with several orders of magnitude higher costs for wholesale ISPs. Aggregated setup costs were about $10-15k for all of Ontario and Quebec. Disaggregated costs $50-150k per CO and would cost hundreds of millions to setup across all of Ontario and Quebec. Since FTTH is tied to disaggregated, Teksavvy has basically lost a large chunk of its market by backing the wrong horse. There are maybe a few dozen people across Canada that truly understand what's going on in the Canadian telecom regulatory world. More people need to educate themselves about what's going on and ask the CRTC to improve the major pain points holding back independent providers.

ShroudedNight 4y ago
To your last paragraph, how does one adequately educate oneself to advocate effectively at the CRTC if the ranks of those truly in the know are so small and inaccessible (seemingly by design)?
- bcrl 4y ago
  It's not by design so much as a result of limited participation by the general public. Proceedings are posted to the CRTC's website and are available for anyone to view and comment on. When it comes to information that the CRTC considers in its decisions, as the CRTC functions quite similarly to a court: they will not consider evidence that is not presented to its version of the public record. Unless the general public submits their comments to proceedings, the comments tend to be limited to the views of carriers and a few public interest advocacy bodies. Stories published in the media, on blogs or elsewhere will not be considered unless someone submits them to the CRTC's record, even though they may be readily access to the CRTC. This becomes quite important when there is locally relevant information that the commission is not aware of, or if there are business practices that the commission should be made aware of. People need to complain when their choice of internet providers is limited or if incumbents increase prices twice a year. If nobody raises these issues at the CRTC, nothing will change.

oogali 4y ago

And if you are going to do anything with voice, you are mandated to connect to the ILEC’s interconnection points (also known as tandems) for exchanging local traffic (as well as negotiating a new interconnection agreement or opting into an existing one). You are also required to connect to all of your region’s 911 interconnection points (also known as public safety access points, abbreviated as PSAPs) which are distinctly different than the aforementioned interconnection points. Finally, if you have an outage over 30 minutes in the US, in most cases, you are required to report that to the FCC within 2 hours of the event, then submit a final post-mortem within 30 days. Voice is no joke.