Comments on: Rogers' Telephony Plans: Underwhelming

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 18:38:55 +0000

There's no real such thing as POTS “from that point on” anymore. The access and termination points are of course dependent on Rogers and the terminating carrier.
But the in-between part is pretty much a dog's breakfast, and that goes for Bell POTS, SBC, Rogers, or anyone else. To understand why, see a minutes trading marketplace like Arbinet. A pretty impressive proportion of “POTS” LD traffic was transiting as IP and, in many instances, over the public Internet as of years ago. And it's been a long time now that TELUS announced that it had converted its network core to IP.
Fundamentally, what matters is whether the carrier is managing its own traffic on a dedicated network, or whether it's leaving it up to someone else to deal with. The latter describes the Internet. The former describes internal traffic engineering — IP over ATM over fibre, TDM over ATM over fibre, TDM over frame-relay over satellite, whatever. “POTS”, after all, is not a protocol, only a service specification.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:29:48 +0000

Rogers' new plans are just regular local phone service provided by a cableco, rather than Bell.
Exactly.
The thing is, they never claimed otherwise. Some of the reporters have hyped it as a fancy VoIP offering, but Rogers was talking about this for a long time now — and PacketCable is just the protocol they eventually settled on to implement this.
The fact is, comparing this to access-independent services like Primus, Bell Digital Voice, Vonage, or Skype is like apples and oranges. Those are Internet applications. This is a dedicated service, complete with truck roll. The Internet applications are a heck of a lot more exciting; Rogers doesn't appear to be interested in that space at this juncture.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:51:10 +0000

Is this the Rogers VoIP service they've been touting? Or just Sprint in a new dress?