FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
What makes a phone carrier so much less risky than an ISP.
Watch the video. Physical infrastructure is out of the vendor's control and is always at high risk, always. Servers are low risk, they are easily protected. It's just system failure rates. Phone carriers have very little equipment that is easy to make redundant. ISPs rely on many moving parts that are highly exposed and often impossible to make redundant. Result: phone systems are vastly more available than ISP resources, even though ISPs spend billions and the phone carriers spend thousands.
It's like asking which is more likely to experience a failure... a filing cabinet or the national highway infrastructure.
Everyone uses filing cabinets and most people never see one fail. People driving on the highway experience construction or accidents every few weeks of driving (or more.) Has nothing to do with cost, it's about complexity. There is no way to build a highway that fails less than a basic filing cabinet, it's just not feasible.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
They both deliver last mile service to their customers - where, granted, most of the problems occur.
No, they do not. One IS last mile, the other is not in the slightest last mile but is a datacenter service. Totally different things.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Back when I used to have traditional copper based phone, it almost never went down.
Everyone says this, but back in the POTS era, I knew all kinds of outages, some going for years that the phone companies could not fix. That POTS "always worked" is one of those rose coloured glasses myths. Back then, we never said things never failed, now looking back suddenly we do.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
the outages by comparison to copper phone connections have increased dramatically! - why is that? Are networks at that scale just inherently unstable? more difficult to keep equipment running? more prone to environmental failures, etc, etc, etc?
This is because you've changed your definition of an outage. In the old days, you accepted "any signal on th eline" as "up", today if the signal isn't absolutely pristine, you consider it "down". Because it used to be analogue audio, not digital data. The lines today carries literally tens of thousands times the data than they used to, at thousands of times the quality. If all you wanted to was to "make sound" over the lines, today's lines are way more reliable.
QUality has gone up, but not as fast as customer expectations.
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@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
They both deliver last mile service to their customers - where, granted, most of the problems occur.
No, they do not. One IS last mile, the other is not in the slightest last mile but is a datacenter service. Totally different things.
Centurylink was a phone carrier LONG before they were an ISP... they definitely provided last mile.
Granted, the advent of SIP allowed a divorce between physical infrastructure and the phone carrier, but that means you're looking only at businesses that have moved to that model... and granted, most old school carriers/ISPs have not.
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@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Back when I used to have traditional copper based phone, it almost never went down.
Everyone says this, but back in the POTS era, I knew all kinds of outages, some going for years that the phone companies could not fix. That POTS "always worked" is one of those rose coloured glasses myths. Back then, we never said things never failed, now looking back suddenly we do.
Clearly the infrastructure where you worked and lived and experienced had these kinds of issues in spades, many of us elsewhere have never experienced the problems you speak about - months longs outages, etc. I'm not saying they don't happen, I'm sure in crappy parts of whatever they certainly do happen, they just aren't universal.
The video was great though - I do appreciate how you broke out the last mile companies versus the services that can, and often do, live in a DC. Though I think you should redo your video and use "last mile provider" not phone carrier versus ISP. CenturyLink/AT&T/Verizon, etc are all carriers AND ISPs it's only the last mile issue that generates all the risk you're speaking of. The novices watching all of the Professor videos could easily be confused by you not allowing for CenturyLink to be a phone carrier - which they clearly are - and how they started life, but expanding to say 'last mile provider' would clearly show the line you're talking about.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Centurylink was a phone carrier LONG before they were an ISP... they definitely provided last mile.
No, you are STILL talking about the ISP portion. You aren't understanding the difference between the phone service and the physical infrastructure. They were still two different things long ago.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Granted, the advent of SIP allowed a divorce between physical infrastructure and the phone carrier, but that means you're looking only at businesses that have moved to that model... and granted, most old school carriers/ISPs have not.
Yes, they have. All have, long ago. They just bundle it and hope you don't realize it, which is working. CenturyLink's phone service and ISP are two totally separate things under the hood.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Clearly the infrastructure where you worked and lived and experienced had these kinds of issues in spades, many of us elsewhere have never experienced the problems you speak about - months longs outages, etc. I'm not saying they don't happen, I'm sure in crappy parts of whatever they certainly do happen, they just aren't universal.
It's the "gets lucky" effect. In infrastructure, you tend to get nine people with zero problems, and one with giant ones. If you work with lots of customers, regions, carriers, you start to get averages. If you only ever look at your own, or a few, you tend to either see insane numbers of outages, or zero. Most people report zero, but all reports of zero are meaningless. Just like RAID failures. This is why understanding WHY things fail is required, and all observation of success is meaningless.
Understanding statistics and failure dispersion is required here.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
CenturyLink/AT&T/Verizon, etc are all carriers AND ISPs
But all, by law, and by physical necessity, MUST operate them as two different things. That one company owns two businesses is just common sense. That's not relevant, it's still bundling versus not bundling. And none of them pretend that they are combined, all of those sell them separately, proving the point.
