7 ms·

It seems like "hard" IP phones are becoming obsolete at this point. I definitely haven't included them in any new office I've spun up in the past five years.

It seems like "hard" IP phones are becoming obsolete at this point. I definitely haven't included them in any new office I've spun up in the past five years. WFH during the pandemic really sealed the deal - it's not like everyone went around installing new work phones at home. Video conferencing replaced conference phone calls for almost every corporate use case. Consumer business-wise, outbound phone use cases are easily (and better!) handled with a software solution, and inbound phone use cases can be handled with e.g. Twilio or something like Amazon Connect. On the small business side, something like Grasshopper works just fine.

Nextgrid 4y ago
This is a huge shame. I wish I could use a hardware phone or at least a SIP client. While there's technically no reason why a computer can't do just as well as a dedicated phone (after all, a phone is just a low-powered computer), in practice, modern computer-based communications software is terrible. Protocols are all proprietary and are often centralized - there is no P2P, not even optionally. This is something Skype used to do brilliantly over a decade ago (on much slower hardware), preferring P2P if possible. The clients themselves are absolute trash. Hardware phones still have CPU speeds measured in megahertz and are faster & more responsive than modern communications software on multi-core, multi-gigahertz CPUs and gigabytes of RAM. Teams is the worst offender here, but even Zoom is not that great. Again, this is a problem that was solved decades ago, I remember having perfect calls on TeamSpeak 2 back in the days on machines much slower than now and sub-megabit DSL connections, and yet it's no longer something I can take for granted nowadays. I can establish and answer a SIP call between 2 hardware phones faster than the Slack takes to load. At least if they were using a standard (or at least documented) protocol I could write my own client, but since the objective is often "growth & engagement" that's not possible either because the annoyances of the official client are considered a feature by the original developer.

Nextgrid 4y ago

This is a huge shame. I wish I could use a hardware phone or at least a SIP client. While there's technically no reason why a computer can't do just as well as a dedicated phone (after all, a phone is just a low-powered computer), in practice, modern computer-based communications software is terrible. Protocols are all proprietary and are often centralized - there is no P2P, not even optionally. This is something Skype used to do brilliantly over a decade ago (on much slower hardware), preferring P2P if possible. The clients themselves are absolute trash. Hardware phones still have CPU speeds measured in megahertz and are faster & more responsive than modern communications software on multi-core, multi-gigahertz CPUs and gigabytes of RAM. Teams is the worst offender here, but even Zoom is not that great. Again, this is a problem that was solved decades ago, I remember having perfect calls on TeamSpeak 2 back in the days on machines much slower than now and sub-megabit DSL connections, and yet it's no longer something I can take for granted nowadays. I can establish and answer a SIP call between 2 hardware phones faster than the Slack takes to load. At least if they were using a standard (or at least documented) protocol I could write my own client, but since the objective is often "growth & engagement" that's not possible either because the annoyances of the official client are considered a feature by the original developer.