3 ms·

Honestly? I've taken to hanging out on phone conferences with friends a lot more recently. It's not exactly a high bandwidth medium, but there's a lot you can s

Honestly? I've taken to hanging out on phone conferences with friends a lot more recently. It's not exactly a high bandwidth medium, but there's a lot you can squeeze into mu-law as a codec, and I'd genuinely like to see the network stretched in interesting ways. I guess the most obvious thing for a non-realtime discussion would be like a bulletin board; 818-260-6100 is an example of one for jobs on a small scale. The phone network has been around for over a century in some form now, and has remained as open as it always has. Just how I see it, anyway.

hucker 11y ago
I like this. I've started to try to call my friends more instead of messaging them through some social network, this seems like the natural extension to that. Does iOS or Android offer some kind of built in conference function? Or do you use a service or something self hosted?
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  I thought Google hangouts allow for conference calling. I'm not sure what the limits are in terms of how many people you can have on a hangout at a time. I'm pretty sure this was one of the selling points of hangouts to begin with. http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/ http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/
  - hucker 11y ago
    Over the regular phone network?
    - doctorshady 11y ago
      Most phones have a three-way calling feature. With most cell phones, it's done via the switching equipment rather than the cell phone itself to avoid generational loss from the mobile codec/reception issues. You can string a bunch of three-wayed calls together if you want. The switching equipment itself also has some pretty interesting conference related features. There's a line of equipment called the DMS-100 that's pretty popular for wireline stuff. It has a function where it'll pretend a conference bridge is a ringing number when it's empty. When someone else gets on, it'll play a short burst of ringtone to indicate it, and conference together quite a few people. AT&T runs one of these in the bay area; 415-274-0001.
unimpressive 11y ago
You might want to look into what phreakers were doing from the 60's onwards for an idea of how you can stretch the phone network. An old favorite was voicemailboxes as a sort of forum. You'd take over some poorly secured company voicemailbox and use it as a communications hub. Of course nowadays the theft aspect is no longer necessary.

hucker 11y ago

I like this. I've started to try to call my friends more instead of messaging them through some social network, this seems like the natural extension to that. Does iOS or Android offer some kind of built in conference function? Or do you use a service or something self hosted?

at-fates-hands 11y ago
I thought Google hangouts allow for conference calling. I'm not sure what the limits are in terms of how many people you can have on a hangout at a time. I'm pretty sure this was one of the selling points of hangouts to begin with. http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/ http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/
- hucker 11y ago
  Over the regular phone network?
  - doctorshady 11y ago
    Most phones have a three-way calling feature. With most cell phones, it's done via the switching equipment rather than the cell phone itself to avoid generational loss from the mobile codec/reception issues. You can string a bunch of three-wayed calls together if you want. The switching equipment itself also has some pretty interesting conference related features. There's a line of equipment called the DMS-100 that's pretty popular for wireline stuff. It has a function where it'll pretend a conference bridge is a ringing number when it's empty. When someone else gets on, it'll play a short burst of ringtone to indicate it, and conference together quite a few people. AT&T runs one of these in the bay area; 415-274-0001.

unimpressive 11y ago

You might want to look into what phreakers were doing from the 60's onwards for an idea of how you can stretch the phone network. An old favorite was voicemailboxes as a sort of forum. You'd take over some poorly secured company voicemailbox and use it as a communications hub. Of course nowadays the theft aspect is no longer necessary.