> I'm not sure there were ever truly "bellheads" and "netheads". In my experience, I've seen these terms used to refer to circuit-switched/deterministic vs pac

> I'm not sure there were ever truly "bellheads" and "netheads". In my experience, I've seen these terms used to refer to circuit-switched/deterministic vs packet-switched/opportunistic routing. Bellheads, having done frequency-division and then time-division multiplexing, derisively referred to packetized voice as "statistical multiplexing" and ridiculed its pathetic jitter characteristics. (Radio stations still use ISDN for some things because it guarantees latency and jitter performance that Ethernet can't.) Netheads, convinced that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a packet, said bellheads and their obsessions with latency and jitter were stuck in the past. Throw enough bandwidth at the problem, was the theory, and it's just not a problem anymore. Literally everything that matters to anyone could be stuffed into packets, and if that failed to meet some QoS requirements, then the requirements were wrong. And nobody would care because it'd be so much cheaper. Ultimately the latter approach seems to have panned out, but IMHO, more's the pity. I still miss the imperceptible latency of a good old POTS connection. The way we all step on each other in Zoom calls today is a special hell we could've avoided.