4 ms·

Whatsapp is what people use in some countries for contacting a restaurant to reserve a table, contacting a bike shop to ask if you can bring your bike down for

Whatsapp is what people use in some countries for contacting a restaurant to reserve a table, contacting a bike shop to ask if you can bring your bike down for servicing, etc. It has essentially replaced the public telephone network. Skype was never used that universally.

pmlnr 6y ago
> It has essentially replaced the public telephone network. I know. And I think it's insane and horrible.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  The old style phone companies have no one to blame but themselves though, because their "services" were insane and horrible. Phone calls, SMS and data were a goldmine that they were all too happy to exploit for years until (in the EU) regulators stepped in. International calls or roaming outside the EU is still expensive, even in 2021! Not to mention that unlike Whatsapp, Facebook or Skype, on POTS/mobile phones you don't have any option to deal with spammers, call ID fraudsters and other bullshit.
- lupire 6y ago
  Why? The "public" telephone network is still provided by a business. You can't host your own phone server for people to call.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    The public telephone network is incomparably more interoperable than something like WhatsApp. You cannot self-host it, but you can keep the exact same phone number while switching providers (which is even more flexible than email), phone manufacturers and OSes, and "client" (phone modem) implementations at will. No such thing is possible with WhatsApp. Various implementations come from the same company, do not have feature parity (e. g. phone calls are not supported on certain mobile OSes), and definitely don't allow anything in the way of integration with the outside world. A PSTN connection can be hooked up to a PBX to let you automate voice and all kinds of other things, while SMS can be synced to the computer using an app with the appropriate permissions. In short, PSTN is malleable, while WhatsApp is not.

pmlnr 6y ago

> It has essentially replaced the public telephone network. I know. And I think it's insane and horrible.

mschuster91 6y ago
The old style phone companies have no one to blame but themselves though, because their "services" were insane and horrible. Phone calls, SMS and data were a goldmine that they were all too happy to exploit for years until (in the EU) regulators stepped in. International calls or roaming outside the EU is still expensive, even in 2021! Not to mention that unlike Whatsapp, Facebook or Skype, on POTS/mobile phones you don't have any option to deal with spammers, call ID fraudsters and other bullshit.
lupire 6y ago
Why? The "public" telephone network is still provided by a business. You can't host your own phone server for people to call.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  The public telephone network is incomparably more interoperable than something like WhatsApp. You cannot self-host it, but you can keep the exact same phone number while switching providers (which is even more flexible than email), phone manufacturers and OSes, and "client" (phone modem) implementations at will. No such thing is possible with WhatsApp. Various implementations come from the same company, do not have feature parity (e. g. phone calls are not supported on certain mobile OSes), and definitely don't allow anything in the way of integration with the outside world. A PSTN connection can be hooked up to a PBX to let you automate voice and all kinds of other things, while SMS can be synced to the computer using an app with the appropriate permissions. In short, PSTN is malleable, while WhatsApp is not.