".any and all phone service in the US is VOIP once it leaves the central switch".
It's about this statement which I disagree with.
To make it even worse a lot of phone service starts as tcpip. Cable is this was. Never gets "switched".
Im not exactly sure what those sentences mean but the central switch is a long standing industry term for where lines within the LATA did in fact get switched. Mabel->mechanical relays->logical relays->routers that was the progression. please note that both routing schemes actually do have the word 'switched' in them. what we now call hops, were once switches.
I'm guessing your schooling came in long after this time judging from your understanding of network architecture and industry standard language.
not quite. EXACTLY at this time. As I get old and approach retirement (should I live) I have come to realize that I was lucky. born right place, right time, right education. right choices. worked for the right people. When I started EE at CMU in 1982 we were converting ARPANET to TCPIP. We played on networks people only dream of. I was so enthralled with what made me the school geek in HS (poly 88, TRS and apple programming and yes I still had a GF and played sports) that I gladly switched majors to CS. when I joined IBM in 87 the big network sexy was SNA. It was faster, more robust, more secure..but vastly more expensive. Whereas SNA was the rich mans game, TCP was the everymans game. In 1999 Visa lured me away and we did the SNA->TCP switchover on what remains today the largest worldwide network (not the fastest, but by far the largest and everyone uses it every day of your life - even if you dont own a visa card, even if you dont own ANY card) the performance hit was MASSIVE but volume and cost won in the end. any idiot can jump on a TCP network (and boy oh boy they do!)
Like I say, I was lucky to be right there at the golden age. oh the stories I can tell..and the thing is I am not a 'network guy', I made my bones in what we call 'main supervisor'
sidebar: I used to be neighbors with Tommy Hoover. most do not recognize that as a name, but an old school died in the wool mopar guy will. we used to meet a couple times a week at 'mcBrides' aka 'sams' (an old skool garage) in the town we lived in, shoot the shit, listen to his stories..complain about bonehead factory moves....you can tell by the gleam in his eye he lived an automotive golden age. everything he did, while archaic today, made today possible in the automotive sense. In fact, when mopar brought back the hemi (semi hemi to be exact) they consulted with him and gave or sold at a cost a hemi 300 for his contributions. he and his team were mavericks and for whatever reason, many in his team retired in PA (we dont tax retirement and dont have giant bugs or alligators like FL) and live close enough to me that I have met them all at our car cruises and formed friendships. If you ever talked to him, you realize he forgot more yesterday, than most engineers will ever know to use a cliche. when I think back over my 41 years of experience, I understand how you can look back wistfully and think 'those were the days...'