Charles on… anything that comes along

I have a horrible feeling that when Peter Cochrane writes in his Uncommon Sense column that VoIP spam - it’s coming that he’s absolutely right.

What will we call it? Apart from the usual rude phrases we shout at telemarketers, I mean.

A nice point he makes: Over 100 years of continual engineering development have led to performance standards from telcos that have yet to be attained by other industries… the established reliability of a local switch is the fabled 5 x 9s, or 99.999 per cent uptime - that’s a yearly downtime of less than five minutes.

Such performance has led to the notion that you can always rely on the telephone no matter what. This is not something that can be said of mobile networks or indeed VoIP, where I sometimes think it would be nice to see reliability figures exceeding 9 x 5s (55.5555555 per cent).

Drat. And it was all looking so bountiful on the new frontier.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• That wheezing noise? It's Portable Media Centers (or Centres) (24 July 2004; score: 58.43%)
• Word of mouth: why Skype is so interesting (9 March 2005; score: 56.91%)
• Please accept this spam as confirmation of your existence (20 July 2004; score: 49.29%)