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This is a weird article that imagines that businesses skipped straight from analog -> IP. They mostly didn’t. Mid-size and larger businesses had been running di
by D13Fd 4y ago
This is a weird article that imagines that businesses skipped straight from analog -> IP. They mostly didn’t. Mid-size and larger businesses had been running digital phones and PBX systems for years and years prior to IP phones.
- don-code 4y agoThere's an awkward, intermediate step, sort of like what we had with 1G cellular: while the signalling was all digital (but not IP), the actual voice payload was carried on a dynamically-provisioned analog channel. We had Merlins at my parents' store when I was growing up, and an interesting artifact of the analog channel was that some analog data was possible. For instance, we hung a fax off one of the Merlins (14.4k was fine); I likewise got get 33.6k off it when I plugged in my modem, but could never get 56k. In hindsight, that's because 56k actually requires the line to support digital signalling, which the Merlin did not.
- jcrawfordor 4y agoThis was sort of a terminological failure on my part... When I say analog I am including typical digital PABXs. Now that's somewhat fair because a number of small and medium business "digital" PABXs used digital signaling and analog audio, especially key systems. But there were plenty of entirely digital systems, and of course ISDN had decent popularity in large institutional contexts. I'm not sure what a great term is to encompass all of these systems besides "non-IP." But on the small business end, most businesses are doing just that right now... Going from one or two analog lines to a cloud managed IP solution.