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Landlines have been digitized too, a distinct difference to what an analog landline offered. It was more intimate, you could hear breathing for example.
by the-dude 5y ago
Landlines have been digitized too, a distinct difference to what an analog landline offered.
It was more intimate, you could hear breathing for example.
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- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wanderingstan 5y agoI had forgotten about hearing breathing; you’re absolutely right it was more intimate.
- the-dude 5y agoAs I remember it, one could be silent and still be together.
- elzbardico 5y agoI think that at least for long distance calls, landline calls have been digitized and packet switched since the 70's, didn't they?
- EGreg 5y agoNo. Otherwise why would things cost $3 a minute until VOIP?
- philjohn 5y agoBecause VOIP hadn't come along, so they had a monopoly and could charge pretty much what they wanted. They switched to digital because it reduced their costs, instead of multiple trunk lines you could get away with fewer fibre lines.
- EGreg 5y agoWhy didn’t they compete with each other to bring costs down? You mean they had a cartel for decades, kept prices artificially high, didn’t compete and the government did nothing? Yeah sounds like the cablecompanies…
- pfranz 5y ago> Why didn’t they compete with each other to bring costs down? I remember that happening in the 90s due to deregulation and breakup of at&t. 10-10-321 had a lot of commercials in the 90s[1]. I'm sure they're on YouTube. Most people I knew would go to a convenience store to buy a pre-paid card for long distance. 1-800-collect was a similar service that had a bunch of ads for calling collect. It kind of makes calling confusing (and required going to a store and buying something upfront), but I remember younger people (who probably weren't paying for the landline at home) never really considered using their home phone's long distance service. I think most landline services kept their high prices because the few that used it were too lazy or didn't know better. I wouldn't be surprised if it's still expensive (I haven't had a landline in over a decade). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-10-321#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-10-321#History
- jeffbee 5y agoDigital yes, packet switched no. Traditional long-distance telephony was digital and circuit switched.
- dylan604 5y agoIt was also more hackable. You could litterally open up one of those grey phone company stumps with a 7/16" socket, and then just start rewiring the connections. I had a friend that knew which cables ran to their house, and could use a couple of wires to jump them to another line. They were able to "borrow" someone's line and routed to the 2nd twisted pair for their house. They rewired the phone jack in their room to have a 2nd line. Everything was good until they forgot to unplug the phone while they were not home, and someone rang the other house and it rang in their room while the parental units were home.
- quesera 5y agoA great deal of (most?) last-mile connections are still over copper, so this capability is still common.
- jeffbee 5y agoYou mean packetized. Digital isochronous landline services existed for decades. The "T" system was deployed by AT&T in 1962. Digital telephony is in fact awesome. There's no reason why "digital" needs to mean "it sucks". The reason voice over mobile networks sounds terrible is because traditional landline service uses a 64kbps isochronous channel and lossless 8-bit/8kHz coding, while mobile uses a voice estimation model that transmits its parameters every 20ms at ~3-6kbps and suffers from frequent frame loss. VoIP can sound much better than mobile but may occasionally suffer delay and loss which never happened with traditional telephony.
- tuxoko 5y agoWhy does digitization affect breathing sound? Isn't that because of the position of mic of landline phones?