IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

For those of you that don’t know, there’s a fairly large contingency of Global Crossing folks that live and work in Rochester, NY. (Myself being one)  The reason behind that, is Global Crossing’s purchase of Frontier Communications in 1999.  Frontier Communications’ roots was Rochester Telephone.    Rochester has a lively and, within telecom circles, strong telecom heritage.  What a lot of people don’t know is that circuit switching telephone technologies and Rochester, NY have much more in common than meets the eye.  Enter Almon Brown Strowger

According to wikipedia: 
Almon Brown Strowger, Penfield native invented the automatic telephone switch. He was born in Penfield, near Rochester, New York..
“The story has it that Strowger, who according to historians was described as "eccentric, irascible and even mad," was motivated to invent an automatic telephone exchange after having difficulties with the local telephone operators. He was said to be convinced that the local manual telephone exchange operators were sending calls to his competitor rather than his business. He also suspected that the telephone operators were influencing the choice of undertaker when his business was requested. The origin of this suspicion reportedly arose from an incident in Topeka when a friend died and the family contacted a rival undertaker. Other stories claim that the wife or, possibly, the cousin of a competing undertaker was a telephone operator and Strowger suspected that the operators were telling callers that his line was busy or connecting his callers to the competition. Yet another story has him boasting of inventing "the girl-less, cuss-less telephone." No reliable details survive to substantiate these claims. Hence on, after inventing his switch, he said "No longer will my competitor steal all my business just because his wife is a Bell operator.”
Adam “voiploser” Uzelac