Comment by nofriend
11 hours ago
Was it actually superior though? The usual treatment is that packet switching works better at the scale of the internet. With voice, hogging a whole line works, but for the internet it makes more sense to slow everybody down when congestion occurs rather than preventing some people from connecting at all. I get why the telecoms would have you waste your bandwidth reserving a connection you don't need, and I get why they would try and sell that as a superior solution because of some nonsense about reliability, but I don't see it as providing much benefit to the user.
One reason I heard the internet works as well as it does is that it inverts the bell system. Where the bell system is a smart network with dumb edge devices. The internet is a dumb network with smart edge devices. The reason this is supposed to be better is that it is much much easier to upgrade the network.
And this sort of checks out, most of the complaints about the internet architecture is when someone starts putting put smart middle boxes in a load bearing capacity and now it becomes hard to deploy new edge devices.