I like that landlines call a house, not a person. If I call my parents' landline, I never know which of them I'm going to talk to, and sometimes I just want to talk to "my parents" and not specifically pick which one.
I also like that landlines can't be used to hijack your brainstem to the same degree that smartphones can. My friend's five year old gets to call her grandpa and grandma whenever she wants but can't get pulled into some YouTube Kids nonsense just because the screen was handy.
I've noticed this with my young cousins. Has to be the tangibility. Like sure Daddy's cell phone is easier to use - I can tap Mommy's face and start a video call - but the landline is Big and Noisy and has Moving Parts just like my toys. And I don't have to ask permission to use it. I can see the appeal.
Fwiw they feel the same way about digital cameras and ipods - touchscreens are "simple" but nothing beats a single-purpose tool for playing around with.
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.
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.
For a while I had one of the chunky old black AT&T desk phones set up in the living room, wired to our ISP-provided VoIP box. One afternoon my 7 year old niece was visiting and we realized she'd never actually interacted with a land-line, so we spent the next hour playing with it. It took her a little bit to figure out the physical actions of lifting the handset and dialing the number, but then she had an absolute blast calling her parents, her grandma, my wife, and me. I snuck upstairs and called her, which surprised her.
When I was a kid, I liked to play with the old rotary phone in the shop, and I always wanted to goof around with mom's old typewriter. There's something about these very tactile old devices that appeals to kids (and adults)
I remember being a little kid playing with the landline, just punching the numbers randomly, and eventually the operator came on and told me to stop playing with the phone!
When growing up watching Americas Funniest Home Videos my brother and I would run to the kitchen phone to press 1, 2, or 3 to ‘vote’ for our favorite finalist.
I have a toddler and I've been thinking about landlines for a while now. How do I teach him how to answer a call? I remember listening to my parents saying "this is she/he" when they answered a call and being amazed at that sentence.
But more than that, when he's a little older, how would he call anyone to get help? When a phone is locked, you can call 911, but it's not really obvious how. A landline would be a nice big target.
That said, our house, despite being a century old, doesn't have a single phone jack. I've been thinking about running an ethernet line for a VoIP phone, but they are pretty "buisness-y" and not the nicest to look at. Does anyone have a recommendation for a simple to use/nice to look at VoIP phone?
EDIT: Looks like there are adapters that take ethernet in (and I could split the PoE for power too) and go out to a phone cord. I would probably want to terminate it to a wall plate, but then I could just buy any old phone I liked.
When my oldest was 6 and started walking home from school by herself, we got a cheap push-button landline phone and an cheap no-name box where you would plug power and a SIM card into one end and the phone cord into the other end.
Taped a piece of paper with our phone numbers to the phone mount, and she would call us almost every day when she got home just because she could. And she still remembers our phone numbers by heart, 7 years later.
Maybe consider a DECT/WiFi cordless phone that can do VoIP?
Something like https://en.avm.de/products/phone/ (I think they're intended to be paired with the same company's router/modem though). Most of the usual VoIP hardware companies have some DECT phones in their lineup that don't look too different from the analog ones.
If you're put off by the design of phones that try to make joining meetings easier, maybe look for the more basic models, like Poly (now HP) VVX 250?
You may think I’m nuts for this, but I really want a corded phone. I have an old corner shelf from my grandmothers house that used to hold her old rotary phone in a communal space with a small bench and I really want to recreate that experience (minus the rotary, that is a little too affected.
I bought a Grandstream HandyTone 801 as a bridge. I use voip.ms as a service provider. Both are geared toward more technical users, but the service is very reasonable for the price. Instructions for configuring it are clunky but not too bad: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Grandstream_HandyTone_802_-_HT8....
I had previously tried Ooma, but I didn't like that it wanted to sit between my router and modem.
These days it's not uncommon to stack multiple lossy compressors in a chain. Your VoIP phone -> service provider is one codec. Then the phone company to the other phone company - quite possibly re-encoded - then on the other end they re-encode it yet again, to send to the VoIP or cell phone.
IT doesn't have to be that way. Ideally we'd stream the data (whether compressed or uncompressed) directly to the other end. There are standards for this but, well you know how standards are: so many to choose from.
In hindsight I think lossy compression of telephony was a mistake. It's 64 kbps for classic narrowband. GSM and other early digital cellular technologies could provide perhaps 5 - 10 kbps per handset and voice just had to be crammed into that. It made sense in the early 90s in that one application. It makes little sense in other applications, either then or now.
The long distance network of the late 70s into the early 00s was mostly uncompressed digital PCM, while the local loop was analog. The result was a basically distortion-free channel from about 200 to 3 kHz. Oh, and it was mostly synchronous too, so the delay was generally under 100 ms even cross-continent. You used to be able to immediately interrupt the person while talking just as in an real-life conversation. Some telephony systems running over packet-switching with buffering end up with such significant delays in practice that you have to take turns like it's a walkie-talkie.
Oh, and you missed an important one for me, which is that many phones will only use half duplex for the codec (possibly made worse by noise cancelling that will cut the speaker when the mic is active). This is annoying because I used to be able to talk to people on land lines, interrupt them, and then wait for them to finish talking so I can have a turn. Now, as soon as I talk, their audio cuts out, and now I can't tell if they've actually paused to let me talk. I find it very maddening, and difficult to hold a conversation.
Luckily, at least on my phone, when I attach a bluetooth headset, I can still get full duplex audio through the headset
I am not sure which landlines you remember, but VoLTE voice quality is better than every phone I've ever used, from landlines in the 80s to VoIP Vonage phones. POTS systems ran at a lower quality than current phones.
I've never had a cell phone that can match the latency of a 80s or 90s landline for local calls. Maybe the audio is as good, but that delay makes calls distinctly worse.
Latency is a different thing, though. Yes, latency is worse in some cases than copper-connected phones were, but that's a highly subjective statement relative to the connections. But quality alone has never been higher than it was, and it was much lower on landline phones.
The audio is awful. The old landlines advertised hearing a pin drop. And no one laughed at that concept. Imagine trying to hear something comparable with today's mobile phones.
Yeah, I think so too; modern cell phone voice quality has been pretty good in my experience. Granted, I'm mostly only calling other cell phones, so maybe there could be a quality downgrade if you call something truly analog that's still attached to a landline?
Old phones definitely have a distinctive sound that I do like, but I haven't really noticed "bad" audio quality in phones?
If I call with Signal or Skype or something, usually the audio is pretty clear, and doesn't seem to crappy to me. Even "regular" phone service on my iPhone seems to be pretty clear to me.
You could argue that it's "too" clear I suppose, but I don't really think it's a bad thing personally.
Most of the times, videocalls sound too... stuffy for me. There's something off about the frequencies, I'm not sure if that's some kind of tight windowing and aggressive compression, or noise cancelling eating into signal, or both, but it's missing the high-order terms, so to speak.
(I've recently switched to using my headphones over audio jack again, and the problem persists, so it's not the Bluetooth headset profile - though in general, when HSP kicks in, the audio quality goes to the gutter.)
I went through my contacts and changed the default calling modality from phone to facetime audio for some of my frequently contacted family/friends. It's curious to me that iPhone's don't really surface the option to choose between "cellular" and "Facetime Audio" more prominently.
it's a bit like LED and incandescent light bulbs
rice cookers and kamado-san
sure the new is efficient and full of add-on functionalities
but somehow it's still being compared with the old, and still playing catch up
we got "HD" sound, but latency is still there for phones
we got energy efficiency for LED, but it's blasting us with blue light (i got some chicken light bulbs lol)
we got keep warm and scheduled cooking for rice cookers, but it's tainted with PFAS coating and still don't taste as good as kamado-san
makes me wonder what other inventions that beat the old in every possible way..
silicone chips i guess?
death by a thousand cuts sort of situation optimizing for voice clarity while not always maintaining voice quality (compression, background noise filtering, etc) — the method of transmitting the audio is significantly more complicated
Neither? It's however the voice is encoded over the cell network. Again, I don't understand why because there's more than enough signal to stream digital audio. It's like they haven't upgraded voice quality in 30 years despite this being an obvious market advantage.
Hell, you can still rig a physical handset to work with bluetooth + cellphone and it'll guaranteed sound terrible.
As someone who had to make sure that call audio was properly processed on a phone I worked on to make it match today's standards, I can say without hesitation: it's all three.
The codec you get can vary from okay to terrible; the way mobile phones are built these days requires you to do echo cancellation; and the environment phones are used in requires you to do noise reduction.
Just disable audio processing on your phone, feed the network with raw microphone input and notice the complaints from your interlocutors. I've been there :)
> Neither? It's however the voice is encoded over the cell network. Again, I don't understand why because there's more than enough signal to stream digital audio.
Something's gone badly wrong in your memory; landline phones intentionally drop important vocal frequencies and automatically prevent everyone from sounding like themselves. Cell phones don't do that and have always had much, much, much better audio than landlines.
It's why 24.4 kbps is about the max you can get from a modem without your phone line being a fancy one. Compression (in the musical sense not the Information Theory sense, though they overlap)
it's the phone. between the compression, the impression of it being half duplex all the time, and glitches and drops, having conversations on cell phones is so frustrating that I tend to avoid them altogether, to the detriment of my long distance relationships.
I experience these problems even even both of the participants are at home using WiFi calling.
Friend of mine bought an old rotary phone recently, and he spent some time playing with Asterisk to make it so that you could dial different numbers and get things to play. For example, he had it so you could dial "666" and it would play "Antichrist Superstar", and "Jenny" if you dialed "8675309".
I think his goal was to build a toy for his kids in the process. Or maybe just a toy for himself.
I have a century+ old house and want a candlestick phone in my foyer for the effect. Asterisk is super fun. I've been looking into what it would take to candlestick (NLP->) <-> Asterisk <-> some cell phone as my "home" number. The hard part for me is that the candlestick needs to "talk to an operator." [Edit: no dialing]
I’ve been on the lookout for an old analog phone for something similar but a bit different: Home Assistant can tap into a VOIP box and provide voice AI to it so I want to have a phone that you can just pick up and have a conversation with an AI. Maybe use varying system prompts to have it emulate historical figures or celebs or something. Will be fun for my tween I think :)
A long while back, I started building out a Cold War/MAD/Dr Strangelove audio game that would have used a multi-line red telephone (basically, a high stress choose your own adventure). Never got past the initial game dev side to start working on the soft/hardware implementation side, but might have to dink around with Asterick…
My friend told me that it wasn't difficult at all, I think he got the basic setup for it in few hours, and I think once he got it set up, it wasn't difficult to simply add more phone numbers and map them to MP3's or WAV files.
I've had a contact in my phone named "The Beast" with phone number 666 for more than 20 years now. Originally came about as a joke for some high school buddies when we were EXTREMELY into Iron Maiden. Now just a dumb easter egg for myself, or I guess anyone as weird as I am who gets hold of my phone and tries calling 666.
I never had a rotary phone, by the time I was born (1990) touch-tone was pretty much the standard everywhere, and my parents were/are kind of "gadget people" and as such tried to keep their tech super current (we had internet in our house before any of my friends did, for example).
I've never actually used a rotary phone that was actually in service. I think I know how to dial with it, and I've played with one briefly at a GoodWill about 17 years ago. They definitely have a very satisfying "chunkiness" to them, as most clockwork gadgets tend to. I wouldn't mind picking one up but I have to fight against my hoarding tendencies, and I don't have any kids to which I can justify making them a toy.
I’m old enough that, growing up, rotaries would have worked on our phone line but not old enough to have actually had a rotary phone. It did used to cost more for touch tone service though (incredibly) and my dad was cheap so our digital phones were all set to pulse dial mode.
All the “high tech” of a digital phone with the “fun” of having to wait for the digits to pulse out! Also I figured out at a young age that pulse dial was just toggling the rocker switch so I got pretty good at dialing by tapping the switch myself.
> Also I figured out at a young age that pulse dial was just toggling the rocker switch
I saw a Cathode Ray Dude video that talked about this recently. I definitely would have enjoyed playing with this and annoying my parents if I had known that that was how it worked.
The coolest thing IMO watching kids use an old-school home phone is how quickly they pick up new social skills/etiquette, especially compared to something more distraction-prone like Facetime. Also: the first time they try to plan their own playdate is infallibly hilarious.
It was fun not knowing who was calling. Also, when you were calling, you didn't know who would be answering. Like you might want to talk to your friend but their mother or father answered. It would create unexpected interactions.
My parents still have a 'landline' phone, but it's not actually physically connected to a 'land line'. It has a 5G modem in it, but it's billed like a landline phone (no local call charges etc).
The thing that the kids in my extended family have found fascinating is that their great-grandmother still has a rotary phone in a spare bedroom of her house.
Every Thanksgiving holiday they insist on calling people from it.
I hate these articles so much. "Kids love paper maps", "Kids are trading in their smartphones for dumb phones", etc.
No.
No they are not.
Period.
It's a vanishingly tiny group of "kids" and in this case it's because they aren't allowed a smartphone... Ok, sure, any port in a storm but it's not like it was a choice.
I'm not interested in debating when kids should get a smartphone but replace "landline phones" with "discord servers" and it's the same thing. Kids don't care about landline phones (sure it might be interesting initially), they care about talking with their friends. If they only method to do that was via cans and string they would be using that, not because they want to or it's better/best but because it's all they have available to them.
I also like that landlines can't be used to hijack your brainstem to the same degree that smartphones can. My friend's five year old gets to call her grandpa and grandma whenever she wants but can't get pulled into some YouTube Kids nonsense just because the screen was handy.