And centralized. Data is cheap (though they won’t admit that) while big iron cellular core stuff is expensive.
Funny when they billed extra for long distance calls even though all calls were routed through one place for a huge geographic area. Calling your neighbour could be a hundreds of miles round trip over mobile.
Yes. Too much of routing is centralized. Since phone numbers are no longer locative (the area code and exchange number don't map to physical equipment) all calls require a lookup. It's not that big a table by modern standards. Tens of gigabytes. All switches should have a database slave of each telco's phone number routing list, to allow most local calls if external database connectivity is lost. It may be behind, and some roaming phones won't work. But most would get through.
Agreed. Not a justification, but an explanation/excuse as to why systems are less reliable. You're right on the mark -- when reliability doesn't scale with complexity, you get this.
