As recently as 2015, Alex Balashov was on record saying that SS7 and TDM steadfastly remain as the essential building blocks of a reliable PSTN, and that the triumphant proclamations of IP peering were something of a laughingstock, or at least premature.
Well, the much-vaunted move to IP peering in the core of the PSTN itself has finally happened, and has been rapidly gaining steam in the last 5-10 years. The ILEC tandems do not play the role they once did, and the landscape is shifting rapidly. Those of us with a late-2000s era mental model of the US PSTN have been applying incremental patches here and there -- STIR/SHAKEN, SIP peering with this or that mobile carrier, etc. -- but at this point, a major release update to this firmware of the mind is due. This talk aims to provide it as much as possible.
The presentation will take place in Room 106 on Thursday, March 5, 2026 - 10:45 to 11:30
