Comment by Animats
1 year ago
And they actually work! Voice quality is good. There's no echo. There's sidetone, to prevent people from talking too loud.
Yesterday, I was trying to talk to someone whose iPhone is dying. Three disconnects. Hearing myself echoed back after about a second. Too much background noise. Gave up and sent email.
(I miss the days of ISDN voice. 56Kb/s end to end. Full duplex. Rigidly synchronized at the bit level; no packet jitter. That's the best phone calls ever got.)
> Rigidly synchronized at the bit level...the best phone calls ever got.
We must own the same lawn and have the same troubles with the neighborhood kids. It's almost like making a circuit out of a few 7400-series ICs, versus writing a 2GB electron app to increment integers on a 16-core machine... but guess which is easier and more widely used.
This is a reoccurring pattern. The flexibility of general purpose systems beats out even the highest efficiency single purpose systems.
On the other hand I'd have to buy a special headset (this tiny jack) for my handset and overall it's much harder to block callers. But mostly I can't talk hands-free without buying something new.
Also 90% of the time the callers on the landline want my wife and not me, but I'm the one working from home. "Calling the apartment" doesn't make sense for everyone.
I don't really see _any_ benefit since they switched this over to mandatory transparent VoIP. A dedicated ISDN line as a backup was good, I agree.