BRB, founding a lossless audio startup promising a vintage telephonic experience. and gold-plated connectors.
You use your phone to make phone calls?
Get with the program, granddad.
Use Slack, or something.
FWIW, Iâve always hated making phonecalls, even when there was no alternative, and this was my phone.
Iâve been VoIP only on both my home AND my business lines for MANY years. As long as the internet is working, VoIP works. I havenât seen the trouble youâve seen.
Honestly, the trouble usually comes in when doing group calls. And thatâs a problem with the service providing the conference call, in my experience.
Josh
Interesting article until the author starts getting poetic and romantic about old phones:
The handset made telephone calls an undeniably carnal art, one in which a foreign apparatus came into close contact with oneâs face, ear, and lips.
Oh boyâŚ
This tactile sensuality coupled to other rituals of telephonyâthe time-consuming process of shwk-whirrrr dialing or touch-tone button-pressing to enter a number that you could recite as a koan; the sound of the dial tone initiating the invitation to dial; the definitive physical sensation of conclusion as you returned the handset to the cradle to end a call; the fact that the call itself was metered and possibly expensiveâwhich all together made telephony a full-body experience, no matter the content of the conversation, from break-up to take-out.
These all seem like bad things to me, with the exception of returning the phone to the cradle which Iâm neutral on.
Yeah, if you have a solid internet connection and are using a high quality VOIP service (that you actually pay for) with decent equipment, then it works quite well. My office phone uses VOIP and Iâm on conference calls several hours a day for work. On rare occasions we get an echo in the conference system, but 90% of the problems we have hearing each other are when somebody on the line is using a mobile phone in a place that is noisy or has a bad signal.
If, on the other hand, you try to use free conference calling services with dirt-cheap consumer grade VOIP providers, it can be quite hard to hear.
I will just point to this:
Well VoIP is a sorry mess because itâs built on a platform that was never designed to carry real time audio. I mean IP was never planned or designed with an idea that it should dethrone standard analog telephony, let alone carry live video streams.
If you think about it this whole internet thing is at the same time a remarkable piece of engineering and a sorry mess. It is truly remarkable that it can do all the things it does. It is even more remarkable that it is capable on doing them using the underlying tech it has. Take for example your average website nowadays. It uses one syntax to describe the content and structure of the text it presents (HTML), another one to describe the appearance of that text (CSS). This text is generated by running a bit of code on your computer, the client side (JS). Yet another piece of code runs on computer that stores this text, the server side, again using another syntax (PHP perhaps?). Undoubtedly, it uses little bites of information stored in the database which uses yet another syntax to communicate with the rest of the system (SQL?)⌠No less than 5 different standards at interplay needed to generate one single web site. Sure there are many many advantages that come from flexibility, but this cacophony also has itâs down sides. It shows all the hallmarks of a system that evolved organically rather than one engineered from ground up. Give it another decade and better solutions will surely evolve.
Modern phones are wonderful future gadgets. That glass monolith with the Internet inside is our flying car, our hoverboard, our freaking jetpack. Theyâre just hamstrung by (mostly, IMO) disappointing battery life and the sad attachment to shit service providers.
Not sure if serious, but decoupling of data layer from server layer from interaction layer from semantic layer from presentation layer is a good thing.
The hang up slam is a seriously lacking tactile experience.
Otherwise. Yeah, old people be old yâall.
Dear God, Iâm required to do half my job on VoIP⌠bounced from local members, to HQ on the opposite coast, and back. The other day what should have been a 30-minute call dropped three times.
And lousy thermal management and godawful crappy flash chips that in many cases go slow with age, a pain of some older smartphones (run fstrim from cron every 15 or so minutes to turn it from goddamn unusably slow to manageably sluggish) and lack of tactile feedback and⌠and⌠andâŚ
I use teamspeak constantly. Me and a group of friends pay for a medium-high availability (4 nines) hosted teamspeak server. We never have any problems that donât originate from some bozo trying to connect via public wifi, or an issue with our own ISPs. But in anycase, Opus audio codec set to encode at 4-40kbps basically means you could run the thing on a potato and itâd still sound great.
I donât know why podcasters use skype for roundtables when a 50 slot TS server costs about $20 USD per month and beats skype in practically every way (unless you want video).
The doesnât change the fact that cell phone quality is horrible, horrible, horrible. The thought that really gives me pause is when thinking about how horrible cell phone sound quality is compared to POTS service and the remembering that I used to think POTS sound quality was crap.
Cell phone sound quality is a giant leap backward.
Or any of a number of other technologies that are designed to allow you to be interrupted constantly and ruin your concentration and productivity.
Oh yeah, guess spending a ton of hours in meetings and on phone calls instead is soooo much more productive /s
Maybe Iâm just turning into that-asshole-from-IT in my old age; but âconsumerizationâ, with the utterly shit services people are familiar with from using at home clawing their way into environments where you are actually supposed to get things done, strikes me as one of the most pestilent developments in technology(aside from crypto bootloaders, everything phoning home all the time, and Oracle).
People just use awful stuff because itâs free and visible; and familiarity keeps them using awful stuff even when stumping up for something that doesnât suck would make a great deal more sense.
We need an embittered priesthood of condescending mainframe users to keep the rabble in line.
Ugh. Iâve got a technical interview in the morning. The last one I had, the interviewers were using speakerphone on a mobile. And there was a lot of echo.
â[mumble] would you restart [mumble mumble mumble mumble]?â
âIâm sorry, what did you say?â
âHOW Would you [mumble] [mumble mumble mumble mumble]?â
âIâm sorry, but Iâm having a lot of trouble understanding you.â
âHow would you restart [ayish see see?]?â
âUh, Iâm afraid I donât know what that is.â
âHow can you be a Linux technician if you DONâT EVEN KNOW WHAT DHCP IS!!!â
âOh, dhcp. Er, I guess, systemctl restart dhcp, or if that doesnât work, maybe restart it with the script in /etc/init.dâ.
âHmph.â
Or all of them at once, because the problem in this office is a lack of communication, and clearly the way to improve communication is to have as many different communication channels in use at once as possible. That should reduce confusion!
Weâre all in the same room, so we can talk easily, and weâve just been issued noise-cancelling headsets, so weâre not distracted by all the noise in the room.
