Is it the right time to put together a golden oldies album of our public phone system’s greatest app hits?
I think so. Even the FCC is currently scrutinizing carrier comments on sunsetting the copper wires and rusting switches that gave us five 9’s of dial-tone.
This post was inspired by a recent telecom regulatory get-together in which the PSTN’s killer app subject came up.
One of the speakers opined that it’s caller ID.
He then added that the same function could be accomplished with a few lines of code in today’s webified infrastructure.
Ouch.
So I decided to look through the archeological records to set the record straight. Sure the pickings were slim, but I was able to come up with a few additional apps.
To be fair, the original “intelligent network” developed by AT&T was a technical marvel—a cloud-based electronic brain responsible for switching and routing calls without human intervention. SSPs (signal switching points), SCPs (service creation points), and IPs (intelligent peripherals) made up the guts of the Bell network.
And by the way, most of the original hardware involved were essentially general purpose computers with a little database sauce added.
There was an even an app development environment or, as it was called, “service creation”, which boasted a sexy graphical interface to control this thing. Perhaps only a handful of hackers could program it, but still all the pieces were in place by the early 1990s to create and deploy apps on the phone network.
After reviewing the ancient texts, here are some other apps I came up with
Call waiting: a monster app in its day, and still a hit in the wireless world.
Calling card: pre-paid calling cards is a good example of an app that marries some back computer and database software with telephony. Yes, this could be done now with a small Twilio app, but in its day it was a major innovation.
Call routing rules based on time of day or other criteria: used by big companies for their first call centers.
Others? Probably a few more, but the point is the Android Marketplace store gets more new apps in a month or two than were ever coded by all the carrier programmers combined.
Related articles
- Twilight of POTS Regulation (technoverseblog.com)
