Fun reading landline telephony specs

Fun reading landline telephony specs

For various reasons I have started reading the GSM 08.0x chapter. It is mostly about communication between a Base Station System (BSS) and a Mobile Switching Center (MSC). The protocol used is actually based on the SCCP protocol from landline telephony networks (SS #7). The most funny part is the way these specs are written. Most sentences in GSM 08.06 end in “this is of national concern”, or in the Q.71x specification you see classes of reserved fields. One for international use and one for national use where the national telephone monopoly can set the bits they want…. Just by reading the specs you figure out that international telephony is about monopolies communicating to each other, that is so different to the TCP RFCs…