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Categories - Copywriting - Shopping - Free Online Business Help - Telecommunications Services Articles: Telecommunications - An Epic Struggle for Reliability The old saying goes that the only things guaranteed in life are death and taxes. Telephone people like to say that the only things guaranteed are death, taxes, and dial tone. While telephone companies have been able to add revenue with things like call forwarding, caller ID, call waiting, voice mail, and long distance, these items have quickly become standard fare and are now expected by the public pushing profit margins on them back and creating a situation where, as always, TelCos are forced to try to make a living on the equivalent of basic rates of $8 to $10 as mandated by the Federal government and the market. Because of the cost involved in sending out a repairman, a truck roll, to fix a problem with your telephone will put the telephone company in the hole for several months to come on the revenue stream coming from the service that they sell you, a Telco’s financial success depends on your telephone service being 99.999% reliable. They call this the "five nines". Maintaining the five nines, in the face of technological advancement, hasn’t been easy as the nation’s telecommunications backbone has expanded. The first switches, before the advent of solid state, used electro-mechanical relays, that were prone to not making contact as they closed, to connect your call from one end of the country to the other. The longer the distance that your call had to travel, the more relays that had to close, and the better the chances that your call would not go through. Rather than try to ask consumers, who would not understand the enormity of the task at hand when placing a call from New York to San Francisco, to patiently retry to make their connection until it went through, TelCos would have an operator make the call for you. This established the axiom early on that the more equipment in a network, the less reliable the network was going to be.
As electro-mechanical switches were replaced with solid state and a myriad of accompanying switch software problems were resolved, the economics of the rapid expansion dictated the advent of the Digital Loop Carrier. As the population rapidly increased, a TelCo’s ability to keep up depended on their ability to coax enough profit out of their networks to make loan payments to pay for the installation of expensive cable runs. DLC’s, as they’re called, were more cost effective in that they multiplexed many calls over individual wires and eliminated the need for much of the new cabling requirement. Adding DLCs to the network, however, added more equipment and decreased the reliability and the initial DLCs were anything but reliable as they brought equipment and software problems of their own into the fray.
As the industry was struggling through this introduction, it was also asked to bear some of the brunt of the introduction of teletypes, modems and fax machines, which was largely outside of TelCo control. Since teletype, voice and fax data closely resembles voice data, the first time that a TelCo would know that one of these devices was connected to a telephone line was often when they would get a call complaining that a fax or modem didn’t work on a working phone line. In order to keep their subscribers happy, TelCos had to learn not to be abrupt with their customers and coax them into accepting that the problem was not a problem with their telephone line while bearing the cost of doing so. Add to this the same types of problems that were introduced with the Internet and the increase in time that individual users would demand from connections, which were normally shared amongst varying numbers of customers, and the TelCos suddenly found themselves struggling against an opponent that they did not choose.
As Internet customers demanded more and more speed out of a copper network that could not carry data at the rates that subscribers were demanding, TelCos found themselves in a situation where they could not possibly suddenly replace trillions of dollars worth of copper with the fiber that would be required. DSL technology was introduced that would coax higher transmission rates out of copper with a combination of hardware and firmware algorithms, but as usual, the initial technology was extremely unreliable and taxing on a TelCo’s ability to survive.
Now, with the writing on the wall demanding a more robust and higher speed network, TelCos once again finding themselves making a transition in the face of growing clamor for more government intervention in and regulation of their privately owned networks that will only hamper their ability to do so. The introduction of IP for all telecommunications adds another batch of currently less reliable equipment and software to a network that must be reliable in order for it to survive. Routers, while they have improved substantially, are nothing more than glorified PCs and while consumers have grown accustomed to turning their computers off and back on when they lock up, they will not do the same for their telephone lines.
We must take our hats off to these companies who have faced this epic struggle on our behalves while providing a service that has been largely responsible for the country’s development. History tells us that they will once again prevail and provide us with a service that is, like death and taxes, something that we can depend on. Their existence depends on it.
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