The Dial network
Fibre on the seabed, cell towers on the ground, satellites overhead: three mediums, one address space, and a packet format that has held them together since the seventies. Dial replaces none of it. What Dial adds is the piece nobody ever specified. A way for whoever holds a number to say who is allowed to make it ring, and to prove which network a call came in on.
The cable systems and orbital shells on the map are real infrastructure, traced from published landing points and shell parameters, and shared by everybody. The sites, the people and the mesh between them are Dial's route model. The map keeps those two things apart on purpose.
The part that already works
The whole map rests on a trick that is fifty years old. A packet has no idea whether it crossed a glass fibre on the ocean floor, a radio link to a tower three streets away, or twelve hundred kilometres of vacuum. Below the network layer, every medium is replaceable. The internet took on mobile, then satellite, and never needed a redesign for either one. Dial adds a layer at the top and leaves everything underneath alone.
Dial
Who can reach this address, over which of the networks below, and a record of which one a session used. The only new layer here.
Transport
Order, loss recovery, encryption, real-time media. Already medium-blind, thanks to the layer underneath.
Network
One address space for the entire planet. A packet gets routed by where it is going, never by what carried it here. Everything above this line is portable. Everything below it is replaceable.
Link
Framing, error correction and medium access. The last layer that knows what it is running on.
Sea
Single-mode fibreLight at 1550nm, re-amplified roughly every 80km along the seabed.
Land
Fibre, copper, 5G NRThe last mile, the tower, the exchange, and the telephone network behind it.
Sky
Ka/Ku band, laser crosslinksUp to a shell, across it, and back down at a ground station or a handset.
Physical: three mediums, interchangeable from the network layer up
Three mediums
Sea
Almost every intercontinental call is a pulse of light in a glass strand lying on the ocean floor. A few hundred cable systems carry the traffic of the entire planet. A route between two continents is a physical object somebody laid there, not an abstraction.
Land
On land the network stops being one thing. A tower hands a session to a mobile core. An exchange hands it to another operator. A gateway hands it to the telephone network, which was carrying voice long before the rest of this existed. Every one of those handovers is a boundary you want to be able to see.
Sky
Most of the earth's surface has no tower on it and never will. Non-terrestrial networks close that gap. Low orbit keeps latency down, polar shells cover the high latitudes, and a geostationary beam never has to be handed over at all. Your route should not care which one it used.
One route
Every layer of the diagram above turns up in a real call. Two ocean crossings do most of the work. A handful of short terrestrial hops sit around them, and the telephone network takes the last five milliseconds. The only decision in the sequence happens before any of it starts.
≈164ms one wayRound figures for the distances, not measurements. Take the ground away at step 03 and a low-orbit shell carries it instead, for about twenty milliseconds more. Nothing above the network layer ever finds out.
The decision
Everything on this map runs the same protocols. The cable, the tower and the spacecraft are identical either way. What differs is a policy sitting on the number at the far end, so that is where Dial keeps it: on the address, where you change it once and it holds everywhere.
A number that means one thing everywhere. It stays the same when the medium changes, and it says nothing about which medium a call arrived on.
The holder names the classes of caller they will take: their own sites, the public internet, the telephone network. Three words. Not a list of addresses that goes out of date the week after you write it.
Where the policy opens up, it opens at a place you named. You picked the crossing, so you can watch it, rate limit it, and take it away again.
The route a call took is recorded against the identity that allowed it. Afterwards you can answer the question of what happened instead of asserting it.
The oldest public network
Anyone with a handset can reach any number, from any country, with no account and no introduction. That reach is the whole value of a phone number. It is also the whole problem. So the map gives the telephone network its own colour and its own gateways instead of folding it in with everything else. Opening up to it is a decision on its own, and it should look like one.
Asked more than once
Start
Claim an address, set what it will answer, and watch the routes it takes.