episode #3 in our web docu-series about the history of the telecom network
...and the
Victorian Internet.
http://blogs.cisco.com/category/cle/
Transcript:
Dr. Steven Shepard: The day that strikes fear and terror into the hearts of telephone company engineers everywhere is
Mother's Day. Because on Mother's Day, call volume goes through the roof and yet the telephone network is engineered around Mother's Day.
It's designed to handle Mother's Day traffic every day of the year.
Mr.
Gutierrez: We were watching a recent video of an
Oxford mathematics professor speaking to the financial people about the crisis in the financial system and what kind of models they could use to foresee and manage the crisis. He used, as an example of complex networks, the telecom network.
We discussed this video with other regulators of
Central America, and my colleague from
Panama made a very smart comment. He said, "It's not that financial networks are similar to telecom networks, it's that financial networks became like telecom networks because they're using the modern telecom networks."
So it's actually the telecom network, the one that is dictating how our financial system works.
Dr. Steven Shepard: That's a real testament to what this industry is about. You know, people dismiss the concept of the
Bell System, because it's viewed as "old world." That's pre-divestiture. That's the dinosaur. Those are the troglodytes. You know, we're the new phone network today.
But in
point of fact, when you go back and look at what that system was designed to do, there's never been anything built on this planet -- nothing that's capable of meeting it in terms of how it works, how well it's designed, and how strongly it was created to handle every possible circumstance.
That network is measured as being available to its customers, available to its users, 99.
999 percent of the time, all the time.
If I remember the last time I calculated it,
I believe we're talking about 14 minutes of down time per year.
Think about anything else that works that well.
Something as complex as the phone network. I mean, many people describe it as the largest machine ever built. I mean, it's a lot of moving parts, and yet it work, and it works that well.
You know, in
1989, the senior editor at the
Economist magazine,
Frances Cairncross, wrote an article -- a seminal article in our industry called "
The Death of Distance," in which she proclaimed that the arrival of the
Internet had finally put to rest all concerns about distance for communication purposes.
I would argue that it happened much, much earlier than that. In fact, it happened with the arrival of the telegraph.
The telegraph itself was a network that allowed us, using
Morse code, transmitted Morse code, to connect to remote locations to connect businesses together. In some cases, there was even health care.
In fact, it's fascinating to look at this model and realize it wasn'
t as boring as it sounds. There were all kinds of interesting things going on. For example, people who would get on, and using Morse code, would actually chat about important events at the time, about common interests, and about business related issues.
There was one group, which was a group of healthcare providers that actually shared information among themselves about how health care could be used and improved, and so on, based on what they had all known. There were online marriages performed over the telegraph network.
So even in those early days -- I mean, we're talking the
1840s,
1850s. Even then, the concept of using this for the transmission of media-related content was every bit as real then as it is today.
- published: 29 Nov 2011
- views: 6398