99.99 percent reliable. Not so much anymore

[FUEGO]

I'm pretty happy with today's telecom situation. We spend $10/yr on all telecom needs (other than internet at $30-35/mo).

That gets us T-mobile prepaid phone service, a freedompop VOIP cell phone that tends to stay in 4G mode everywhere in the city (= pretty good call quality), and a google voice via Obihai VOIP adapter for a "land line". Add to that the free high quality video and voice chat with skype and google hangouts and it's like we have moved forward 1000x in my lifetime (I'm only 35).

I remember reimbursing my parents for those regional long distance calls to the county next door so I could call my girlfriend during high school (somehow she went to school in our county but lived just over the border in a different county). I probably spent more on those phone calls in a couple months than I do now in a whole decade. And now I'm chatting globally instead of only to the county next door.

 

[Chuckanut]

Our bills were lower too!

Perhaps. But, one phone call or traffic check on a modern cell phone can save a person a huge amount of time in traffic, or driving to a store that's closed, etc.

Overall, I think people are pretty smart. If the higher cost of modern [-]cell phones[/-] pocket computers was not worth the cost, they would not be buying them in such quantities.

 

[mpeirce]

Frankly, even the idea of a phone number will fade soon enough.

DS is on our "family plan" and so I see his usage. Single digit minutes each month. It's similar to him skipping the TV part of his cable installation in his apartment. Just internet for him.

Do we ever call him? FaceTime audio is better quality for voice, so we use that. We "call" him using his ID, not a number. There are lots of voice and video alternatives to "phone service".

Even the phone companies are clued in on this. We recently switched to a new plan that is based on data usage. Phone and texting is unlimited to anyone in North America.

 

[rodi]

Many years ago, I installed a second receiver in my apartment without Ma Bell's permission (or paying an additional fee) and they actually called me and said they'd disconnect my service if I didn't remove the unauthorized handset.

My dad had purchased some illicit handsets from Canada Bell and installed them in our house. We would hide the extra phones if we needed a repair.

He cursed up a storm when the repairman "cleaned up" the extra wiring (all the extensions) after a visit.

(And yes - he rewired it again so we'd have the extra extensions.)

 

[FireBug]

IMHO.... deregulation (Banking, Utils, etc.) have simply lined the pockets of mega corps.

 

[Walt34]

I remember growing up 99.99% reliable didn't mean much when you were on a party line. You couldn't even make a call when you wanted to. That may have been a "rural thing" that city dwellers didn't have to deal with growing up though.

I've heard of party lines but never used one, even in the 1950's growing up. We had one telephone, it was black, had a dial, and sat on a special "telephone table" in the living room.

 

[samclem]

IMHO.... deregulation (Banking, Utils, etc.) have simply lined the pockets of mega corps.

Hmm, hard to see that in all cases.

 

[athena53]

samclem, I'd say that a good portion of the price reduction in airfares was accompanied by SIGNIFICANT deterioration in the quality of the service- smaller seats, no food, fewer nonstop flights, more baby planes (with fewer amenities). I could go on. If you want the experience you had before de-regulation you pretty much have to pay double (or more) for Business Class. Even then it may be "Business Class" in a baby jet, with a connection on a flight that used to be nonstop, and the TSA to deal with.

 

[Midpack]

I can't remember the last time I had a dropped call, and poor connections - that happened with landlines some too, don't kid yourself. I'd never want to go back to a landline, ours was $31/mo and extra for long distance when we dropped it who knows how many years ago (at least 10).

I suppose you miss the phone book too - ours go straight into recycling, I wish "they" would stop dropping them at our houses.

Who are we going to hear from next, a slide rule salesman and a blacksmith?

 

[samclem]

samclem, I'd say that a good portion of the price reduction in airfares was accompanied by SIGNIFICANT deterioration in the quality of the service- smaller seats, no food, fewer nonstop flights, more baby planes (with fewer amenities). I could go on. If you want the experience you had before de-regulation you pretty much have to pay double (or more) for Business Class. Even then it may be "Business Class" in a baby jet, with a connection on a flight that used to be nonstop, and the TSA to deal with.

Well, folks have an option now, which I think is good. They can buy business class for >less< than they used to pay for coach, and get all the goodies, if that's what they want.
People are voting with their wallets, lots more flying today than in the "good old days." And, while hub-and-spoke isn't popular, it has resulted in significant improvements in service to smaller towns. Once you get to a hub, you can get to almost anyplace.
And as far as TSA, I don't think that hoop has much to do with deregulation.

 

[travelover]

My dad had purchased some illicit handsets from Canada Bell and installed them in our house. We would hide the extra phones if we needed a repair.

He cursed up a storm when the repairman "cleaned up" the extra wiring (all the extensions) after a visit.

(And yes - he rewired it again so we'd have the extra extensions.)

These guys were a little more high tech. I knew I was had when first one phone rang, then the other.

 

[Dreamer]

I remember growing up 99.99% reliable didn't mean much when you were on a party line. You couldn't even make a call when you wanted to. That may have been a "rural thing" that city dwellers didn't have to deal with growing up though.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I remember the party line. My grandmother used to say something and if someone questioned how she knew it, she would say "a little birdie told me so". My aunt would say that my grandmother would listen in on other people's conversations.

 

[ERD50]

These guys were a little more high tech. I knew I was had when first one phone rang, then the other.

How would that work?

Extension phones are all wired in parallel. Ma Bell would check the current during the ring cycle, if it was 2x (or 3x) normal, it meant there were 2 (or 3) ringers on the line.

The phones would all ring at the same time.

A trick was to disconnect the ringer on the second phone. I don't think it's too easy to discern the off-hook voltage drop between 1 and 2 phones (it's a constant current loop in that mode). And they'd have to 'catch' you when both phones were off-hook. When a POTS phone is on-hook, only the ringer circuit is switched in.

I suppose if they tried different ringer voltages (I don't think they did), they might detect one ringer kicking in at a different voltage, one might be more sensitive than the other. But I'm not sure this would even be reflected back to the source in any easy to detect way. Even then, one might ring w/o the other, then both would ring as they raised the voltage. No way I know of to ring one, then the other. It's like two light bulbs o the same switch - you can't flip the switch and have one or the other come on (not w/o some 'stuff' in between).

-ERD50

 

[travelover]

How would that work?........-ERD50

Beats me, but I done heared it with my own ears.

 

[GrayHare]

By opening telephony to competition, we've exchanged reliability for options. Unfortunately none of those options are reliability.

 

[ERD50]

Beats me, but I done heared it with my own ears.

Ahhh, but the senses are easily fooled. As Charles Dickens wrote:

`What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of
your senses?'

`I don't know,' said Scrooge.

`Why do you doubt your senses?'

`Because,' said Scrooge, `a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.

But physics, not so much.

By opening telephony to competition, we've exchanged reliability for options. Unfortunately none of those options are reliability.

I think this is true to an extent. The general public wants the sizzle, and boring, humdrum reliability puts the second fiddle on the back burner (just mixing metaphors for fun).

-ERD50

 

[samclem]

I wish cell phones had the voice quality of a typical 40 year-old POTS. There's no technical reason it can't be done, but apparently superb voice quality is just not something that the market values highly. Even pricey and popular smartphones have all kinds of cool features, but are just "okay" as telephones. As long as the call is intelligible, that's good enough I guess.

DW bought an old dial phone for a few bucks at a garage sale and plugged it in to our wall jack. It works great, and I was enjoying the novel experience of "dialing" again--until I got to the phone tree menu at the place I was calling and had no way to "press one".

 

[Rustic23]

I just traded an Iphone 4s for a 6s. Call quality so far, excellent. However, so far all I have done is call from one location. I have not tried going down the highway, talking to another person going down the highway. In fact come to think of it, usually when I had bad call quality with the 4s, it was talking to another phone with one of us moving. Tough to do with POTS.

 

[Texas Proud]

I wish cell phones had the voice quality of a typical 40 year-old POTS. There's no technical reason it can't be done, but apparently superb voice quality is just not something that the market values highly. Even pricey and popular smartphones have all kinds of cool features, but are just "okay" as telephones. As long as the call is intelligible, that's good enough I guess.

DW bought an old dial phone for a few bucks at a garage sale and plugged it in to our wall jack. It works great, and I was enjoying the novel experience of "dialing" again--until I got to the phone tree menu at the place I was calling and had no way to "press one".

Yea, it is funny.... my old boss hated the wait music on our phone system... complained all the time... we went with a company that beamed in music, he hated it... we went with a company that downloaded music to a box... he hated it... he always complained that it sounded bad on HIS cell phone... everybody I talked to in the hold music industry said that is the best they can do....

Now he just has beeps.... but during my time there we went through 3 companies....

 

[FireBug]

Fun fact (and I may be wrong as I got this from an old Telco friend of mine). I asked him how they knew (back in the day) how many extensions I had. He said they would monitor the ringing of phones in a given house and see how much current the riggers would be drawing.

 

[ERD50]

Yea, it is funny.... my old boss hated the wait music on our phone system... complained all the time... we went with a company that beamed in music, he hated it... we went with a company that downloaded music to a box... he hated it... he always complained that it sounded bad on HIS cell phone... everybody I talked to in the hold music industry said that is the best they can do....

Now he just has beeps.... but during my time there we went through 3 companies....

That's one of my pet peeves as well. The compression algorithms used for voice systems like this really mangle music. There should be an industry producing some sort of of simple tone music that doesn't sound so bad over a cell/VOIP phone.

I've actually heard side-by-side tests of some of these algorithms with voice and music in a presentation. To get the compression rates they want, the music suffers terribly.

Fun fact (and I may be wrong as I got this from an old Telco friend of mine). I asked him how they knew (back in the day) how many extensions I had. He said they would monitor the ringing of phones in a given house and see how much current the riggers would be drawing.

No, that's correct. See my post #38. I think they still put REN's (Ringer Equivalency Numbers) on any phone designed to plug into a standard phone socket.

-ERD50

 

[jimbee]

Fun fact (and I may be wrong as I got this from an old Telco friend of mine). I asked him how they knew (back in the day) how many extensions I had. He said they would monitor the ringing of phones in a given house and see how much current the riggers would be drawing.

Yep, that's ringer equivalence number. Telephones used to have a REN specification. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringer_equivalence_number

 

[aja8888]

So was this satire?

-ERD50

Of course...got things rolling....