Comments on: PSTN vs. POTS and Understanding “Good Enough” http://mrblog.org/2006/04/17/pstn-vs-pots-and-understanding-good-enough/ Mr Blog. Very technical, or silly, sometimes absurd. Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:07:07 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc hourly 1 By: JC Francois http://mrblog.org/2006/04/17/pstn-vs-pots-and-understanding-good-enough/comment-page-1/#comment-548 JC Francois Sun, 30 Apr 2006 08:21:02 +0000 http://mrblog.televolution.net/?p=227#comment-548 You are perfectly right. This whole situation reminds me of the beginnings of PC-based computing.<br /> <br /> Back then people would grind and point out that a PC will never be able to match the performance and computing power of proprietary mainframes and supercomputers. Look what happened: by combining these pieces of hardware that are just "good enough" to do the job (but an order of magnitude cheaper) in a smart way we ended up being capable of doing a lot more than a supercomputer (think of Google) with just commodity hardware.<br /> <br /> The same phenomenon is happening with telephony. Sure VoIP can't offer five-nines but who cares? VoIP may represent one step back in quality when measured with POTS metrics but these criteria are no longer those that matter. It is just a small step back before a huge leap forward.<br /> <br /> Just like they are willing to trade voice quality for mobility with cellular phones, users will go for voice/data integrations at the expense of call reliability if necessary.<br /> <br /> The game is moving towards fields where POTS won't be able to follow: voice/data service integration (presence, etc.). Let's compare again when these become uiquitous and decide which one comes out first. You are perfectly right. This whole situation reminds me of the beginnings of PC-based computing.

Back then people would grind and point out that a PC will never be able to match the performance and computing power of proprietary mainframes and supercomputers. Look what happened: by combining these pieces of hardware that are just "good enough" to do the job (but an order of magnitude cheaper) in a smart way we ended up being capable of doing a lot more than a supercomputer (think of Google) with just commodity hardware.

The same phenomenon is happening with telephony. Sure VoIP can’t offer five-nines but who cares? VoIP may represent one step back in quality when measured with POTS metrics but these criteria are no longer those that matter. It is just a small step back before a huge leap forward.

Just like they are willing to trade voice quality for mobility with cellular phones, users will go for voice/data integrations at the expense of call reliability if necessary.

The game is moving towards fields where POTS won’t be able to follow: voice/data service integration (presence, etc.). Let’s compare again when these become uiquitous and decide which one comes out first.

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