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Comment by bcrl

5 days ago

I have cell phone calls regularly drop during tower handoffs, and codec errors that result in a blast of static upon answering a call. I can't remember a single time I had a phone call fail on the old PSTN built out of DMS10 and DMS100s locally (well, until we lost all trunks due to a fibre issue a couple of weeks ago on November 10th -- the incumbent didn't notice the outage which started at ~3:20am until ~9:30am, and it wasn't fixed until 17:38). One time when I was a teenager in the '90s, a friend and I had a 14 hour call using landlines.

The modern tech stack is disappointing in its lack of reliability. Complexity is the root of all evil.