If I Pick Up a Telephone in Los Angeles, and Dial a New York City Phone Number, When the Party in Ne

The "phone number" was actually an E.164 address, much like the MAC address on an Ethernet card. It literally was the exact physical address of the wire pair that connected from the main distribution frame in the nearest CO or wire center to your instrument.

That's all gone. These days, living in a world where literally all voice is VoIP (whether you know it or not) and we have number portability and this little thing called least-cost routing, it's completely impossible.For a while, I ran a company that ran a long distance intermediation service. You'd hand us traffic (via a SIP trunk on VoIP), we'd terminate the call for you. We did that by having a bunch of interconnect agreements with a variety of third parties who had presences on the ground in different NPA/NXX areas, plus a couple who have fixed-price termination to "anything".We sold a fixed price service - let's call it $0.05/minute to anywhere in the US. That was a deal, particularly since there are huge pockets where the base rate today is well above that. We mainly sold to foreign operators and to other carriers who couldn't get deals with some of the carriers with which we had deals. Our job was to makes sure that it cost us less than $0.05/minute for literally every minute that crossed the network.

So, running in real time, we had software that was looking at route updates from our carrier partners. If calls to 212/695 (midtown NYC) shifted by $0.002 in favor of Carrier X versus Carrier Y, we'd shift our routing. Carrier Y would no longer see any of that traffic, it would all go to Carrier X.We'd see similar things - we'd all of a sudden stop getting calls too particular NPA/NXX pairs. We'd be rocking along at a million minutes a month, then *poof*, zero. Sometimes, the retention team would figure out where the traffic was going and why, and sometimes we'd be able to get much cheaper pricing that put us in the running again, and sometimes we'd just shrug and go looking for other places to cut costs.And when those costs got cut - either through negotiation, or through a carrier partner posting a pricing update, which happened several times a day - we'd update routing.Plus, you have the vagaries of IP routing in general. It's on VoIP leaving your phone, it's getting routed over IP to a session border controller which then forwards it according to it's routing rules to somewhere (like, us) and you have no idea what that route is going to look like.You may have a local SBC. You may have a very distant SBC; for instance, I've got one phone on my desk for which the SBC is in New Jersey. You have no idea. You could packet trace your network, find the IP address, geo-locate the endpoint... but even then, your routing to that endpoint will vary by day of week, time of day, outages, changes in peering agreements, all sorts of things.

So it's not even possible to tell what the path is from your phone to the first place it hits the voice network, much less tell how that call actually travels from anyplace to any other place

• Other Questions

Hello I have a question about Germany, if I decided to live in Germany, how is the Islamic life there? Is there Islamic centers that can teach kids about the religion?

First: What is your motivation that you, as a Muslim, want to come to Germany? What will be your contribution to our country, what is your education, your professional experience? Competition on the job market is very high in Germany, with natives as with migrants from EU-countries (often well educated and equipped with all the rights of free movement and job search the EU offers). It is hard for a non-EU citizens to start a decent life here.Some years ago, our president stated, that Islam would belong to Germany. This statement was highly controversial: Historically, Islam is connected to those migrants, who came as "guest workers" from Turkey (and Morocco and Bosnia, to a smaller extend) in the 60s and 70s, so it is too new to be part of the German culture - of course Muslim migrants are part of the German society (as are migrants from all the other countries and cultures and religious groups).If you look at the chart for religious beliefs, you find basically, that about a quarter of our citizens are member of the large protestant church (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland), another quarter Roman-catholic, close to 40% belongs to no religious organization. And that orange slice, about 5%, are Muslims:Source: de/meldung/religionszugehoerigkeiten-2018So being a Muslim basically means dealing with other Muslim immigrants.Beside public schools, a lot of Muslims have their kids taught Islam in one of the many mosques and Islamic centers in Germany. Teachings are usually in the native language of that specific group, and this way of separate education is a bit frowned upon by non -Muslims, especially if the Islamic center is seen as more conservative (which is often radical in the eyes of the non-Muslim majority).

To integrate Muslims into the society, some efforts have been made to also offer Muslim teachings in school (since in Germany the state has the monopoly on education, although religious teachings are an exception).Confessional Christian education is (in most states) part of the usual school schedule; In some states, schools now offer also Muslim teachings (parallel to the Christian ones, and to Ethics, which is read to those pupils who would not like to participate in Christian teachings).nThis is a map, where the different forms of cooperation and offers are shown:Orange means, no offers - so that's all of the former GDR or Eastern Germany which exception of Berlin, since the share of Muslims is very low there (guest workers only came to the West of the republic). Blue is in cooperation with or by Muslim organization - since our fellow citizens from Turkey represent the largest Muslim group, they have a large saying in the religious life down to the school teachings. Light orange (Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein) offer it state-organized. (source: Islam und Muslime)Here is another picture of the beliefs of Muslims in Germany:source: Religious in a secular countryThis is a citation from Goethe Institute (see source above), which gives some more insights:"RELIGION AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR HOMELANDThe German Islam Conference gives the number of Muslim prayer halls as 2,600, of which around 150 are "classic" mosques, i.

e. buildings with a dome and generally also a minaret. With 900 mosque communities, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (Ditib) is the largest association of mosques in Germany. It is governed by the Ankara religious authority and preaches a religiously conservative Islam. After all, the first Muslims to come to Germany in large numbers were the so-called Gastarbeiter (meaning "guest workers") from Turkey, who started to arrive in the 1960s. Many came from rural parts of Anatolia, where the population followed a traditional, primarily Sunni Islam. They and their children and grandchildren still make up a good half of all Muslims in Germany. During the 1980s refugees arrived from the Arab states fleeing civil war there, to be followed in the 1990s by many Bosnians. More than half of the approximately 900,000 people who came to Germany in 2015 seeking protection from war and persecution came from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Eritrea."