I recall during the 90s spending a bunch of time on SF2 and Mortal Kombat in arcades: shopping malls, bowling alleys, even some restaurant/bars that had a small arcade. One of the fun experiences was one arcade that Saturday mornings they had a "Freeplay" time for a few hours where everyone paid like $5 and every game was in Freeplay mode. It always amazes me how we all learned the special moves and fatalities word of mouth and eventually they'd get published in gaming magazines. The whole winner stays, loser pays - folks setting their quarter on the arcade to reserve their next spot. Many years later a coworker and I bought a very well used (cigarette smell and burns) MK2 machine for the office break area that took me back. Comically we found at least $10 worth of quarters inside the enclosure. Good times.
IETF has a history of being hostile to network operators. I mean actual network operators - not the people who show up at conferences or work the mailing list who just happen to get a paycheck from a company that runs a network (and have zero production access / not on call / not directly involved in running shit). It's gotten better in the last few years in certain areas (and credit to the people who have been willing to fight the good fight). But it's very much a painful experience where you see good ideas shot down and tons of people who want to put their fingerprint on drafts/proposals - it's still a very vendor heavy environment.
Even the vendor representatives are mostly getting paid to post on mailing lists and show up at conferences.
They're not building products, and they're not supporting, visiting or even talking to their customers. Design-by-committee is a full time job that people actually building things for a living tend to not have time for.
Folks using nyanpass setup for first hop into a near China hosting provider, then it's usually two additional hops within Asia and then the internet. There's a whole industry / ecosystem of folks who sell this - and set rate limit controls based upon how much you pay etc.
They're both very expensive and the carriers primarily care about cost and features. And huawei will take a dozen devs, give them a one way ticket and put them in a hotel room near a customer to grind our whatever feature needed to seal the deal.
I remember years ago talking to some EU telecom VP who was on the engineering side that said "id buy from North Korea if the price was right".
We live in new times anyways - most of the carriers have outsourced a lot of the tech stuff to the vendors anyways.
Yes. I worked for a Cambodian telco, when there was a range of Alcatel, Nokia, etc switching equipment across 10 carriers. Huawei swept the lot within 2 years, and Alcatel staff told me they were losing everywhere - they couldn't match the price or technology. This was before the US decided to sanction Huawei.
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