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I love landline phones (when they work right, which is not the case everythere) because usually they have better sound quality than mobile (which can be good-to
by ale42 2y ago
I love landline phones (when they work right, which is not the case everythere) because usually they have better sound quality than mobile (which can be good-to-horrible depending on network quality) and almost zero latency.
But it's time to switch to fiber optics!
- Bluestein 2y agoTotally.- PS. But, can you do fence-wire comms with fiber? :)
- schiffern 2y agoWe often talk of developing nations "leapfrogging" landlines and going straight to mobile, but they're also going straight to fiber. It would be fascinating to see this same type of breakdown for rural fiber infrastructure. One obvious difference is that fiber can't self-power a phone, but with ubiquitous mobile phones/solar panels/powerbanks that doesn't strike me as a huge show-stopper. Thanks OP, great post and content. Now I'll go through the world with new eyes! EDIT: found the fiber page http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?t=Fibre%20Optic%20Cables&d=FibreRun http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?t=Fibre%20Optic%20C...
- Bluestein 2y agoInteresting, the "straight-to-fiber" leapfrogging. Was not aware. Makes sense.- I'd be interested to know - qua infra - what their power grids are looking like ...
- detourdog 2y agoEstonia when it left the Soviet Union was offered a used phone system from a country that wanted to upgrade. Estonia decided to build new. https://theconversation.com/estonia-is-a-digital-republic-what-that-means-and-why-it-may-be-everyones-future-145485 https://theconversation.com/estonia-is-a-digital-republic-wh...
- Bluestein 2y agoSmart move.- PS. Also, interesting that there - apparently - is a "second hand" market for used phone systems. As in, wholesale.-
- detourdog 2y agoObviously excepting the cruelty I love the modern world. I marvel at the organization and patterns. The Soviet Union was suffering some food crisis in the 90’s. One morning the news was discussing Clinton granting food aid to them. That same morning as my subway crossed by the Dominoe sugar factory there was already a Russian ship docked. That was such a strange cause and effect moment for me.
- johannes1234321 2y agoIt's interesting with East Germany - after German reunification it was covered with fiber. However then DSL became the standard way of going online in Germany, while that doesn't work on fiberand with only few to no consumer priced offerings for FTTH many areas were left out from "fast" Internet for a while, while having the, in theory, superior net.
- detourdog 2y agoMy guess it was the asymmetry that was the attraction of the DSL. If everyone has equal access to bandwidth the message is harder to control.
- 2y ago
- xattt 2y agoCell phone coverage has been abysmal in my part of the world, to the point where 911 calls can be unreliable (1). (1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-cellular-service-charlottetown-1.7249592 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-cell...
- gary_0 2y agoThe telecom situation in Canada is ridiculous. Even in Greater Vancouver, the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Canada and the 34th in North America, there are dead zones everywhere with major providers. I'm in a suburban development that was mostly built in the last 5-10 years, and there still aren't any towers near here so my bedroom and foyer have no reception (not 1 bar, I mean my phone says "no service, you must be in the wilderness"). I have to stand by a window to make calls. And this is a wood-frame building on flat terrain, next to two major highways.
- simfree 2y agoTelus, Bell and Rogers are ingrained in the minds of Canadians as the only options. Almost all attempts to change that over the years have failed or have not been able to get sufficent market penetration to become self funding for rapid growth. Canadian investment funds would rather go and buy U.S. ISPs from failing ventures like Frontier (creating Ziply Fiber) than investing in Canada because they know how bad the situation is. Getting sub-30% market penetration when offering, better, less expensive fiber internet makes the Canadian market uneconomical for deeper investment by insurgent ISPs. The Canadian consumer is easily swayed by Bell/Telus/Rogers propoganda like https://web.archive.org/web/20140402040045/http://fairforcanada.ca/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140402040045/http://fairforcan...
- ale42 2y agoCell phone coverage in many places is just horrible. You might get good coverage and signal quality, but the network just can't follow when everybody is watching youtube at 4K resolution on their mobile connection. Sometimes even regular phone calls become unreliable (bad sound, interruptions) despite the optimal signal level.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- elzbardico 2y agoThere's also a lot of replacing copper cabling with fiber due to copper cables being frequently stolen.
- lproven 2y agoIt was a surprise to me, moving from London to Brno in Czechia, to find that both mobile and fixed/home internet was both quicker and much cheaper in this former Communist country. The first house I lived didn't even have a POTS landline installed at all; they skipped that tech being rolled out. It was a bigger surprise to me, moving to work for a German company in Prague a few years later and thus visiting Germany for work regularly, that German telecomms was much poorer: weaker mobile coverage, slower and much more expensive Internet, and relatively, very few public wifi hotspots. (I am told that the latter is because of onerous legal restrictions on content that may be downloaded; businesses are liable for anything downloaded by customers on their premises. In comparison, in Czech law it's legal to download copyright material, it's sharing it that's illegal.)
- mschuster91 2y ago> I love landline phones (when they work right, which is not the case everythere) because usually they have better sound quality than mobile (which can be good-to-horrible depending on network quality) and almost zero latency. That was the old landlines, of actual POTS, era. Back then, there was a direct electrical circuit literally switched using relays between both participants in a call, with only amplifiers, switches and power sources in between. More modern systems used banks of relays, and then it all went downhill quality-wise. First, the telco core systems were replaced with digital trunks that had ADCs on both ends of a call in the regional distribution center, and consumers were switched over to ISDN for telephony. Then, the analog/ISDN frontends moved to the curb side where ADSL, VDSL and nowadays G.fast frontends were added to the mix, which were connected to the telco network using fiber. Then, analog and ISDN were shut down, with voice phone calls being migrated to VoIP. And nowadays, it's the full evolution with GPON - on the telco side, there's only fibers and a single TX/RX pair of transmission modules serving up to 64 customers. What used to require a whole multi-story building can now be done in the space of a better-quality shed. And the analog frontend is only at the CPE, if there is an analog frontend present at all and it's not VoIP softphones or DECT.
- Dibby053 2y agoMy new ISP took this to another level: if you transfer your landline phone number they send you a voice-only SIM card and a 4G router into which you're supposed to plug your landline. Calls to the landline number are redirected to the number in the SIM (with a significant delay). I wonder why they did it this way instead of implementing VoIP, especially since the all-in-one GPON/Wi-Fi router already has a landline port.
- actionfromafar 2y agoMaybe requirements on availability?
- dfc 2y agoWhat ISP do you use?
- ale42 2y ago
- razakel 2y agoIt was time to switch to fiber 50 bloody years ago.
- marcus0x62 2y ago> But it's time to switch to fiber optics! The PSTN has been hybrid fiber/copper for decades. The vast majority of inter-CO traffic is carried on fiber optic lines. Many POTS lines are carried on fiber optic carriers from the central office to a subscriber loop carrier or similar device and then only travel a short distance to the subscriber premises on copper lines.
- zabzonk 2y agoin the UK it is typically fibre to the box on the street, and then copper from that to the house. providers would love you to subscribe to fibre to the house (so they can charge you exorbitant prices for it), but really YAGNI for most people at least in my experience.
- sgt101 2y agoThat used to be the case - but it's rapidly becoming standard to be directly connected to fibre. I believe that something like 60% of UK premises have a fibre connection available and I expect that all the providers will push folks off copper as fast as they can. Because copper is a pain in the arse compared to fibre (for the provider). For the consumer copper has one key positive that fibre just doesn't - it works in a power cut.
- lxgr 2y agoIn Germany, in particular in the former East, fiber development inadvertently got in the way of fast home Internet access for many years: Many regions were built out with (at the time of the German reunification) state-of-the-art hybrid fiber/copper systems, with fiber extending even beyond the central office. Unfortunately, the technology used is incompatible with DSL, the access technology of choice of the former incumbent operator, so any landline deployed using it was ineligible for anything faster than dialup until they either built out a copper link to the central office, or upgraded the existing fiber to GPON (which didn't happen until very recently).
- ale42 2y ago> The PSTN has been hybrid fiber/copper for decades. Definitely, I was mainly thinking about those thousands of lines coming out from the CO...
- linsomniac 2y agoIf you think POTS sounds good, you should try ISDN, it'll knock your socks off! Back in the mid-90s I got ISDN BRI (2x64Kbps channel) service in to replace analog modem service. It would connect in well under a second, and while connected at 128K we could receive a phone call (dropping one of the channels, so having voice plus 64K data), and the phone calls sounded quite good. It used to be that for recording remote interviews or even I believe just general voice recording like audio books, the media companies would have you come into a location that had ISDN, and if you were a real big timer you might have ISDN in your home studio. That was back in the day when they gave a crap, then the pandemic came along and the media companies seemed to be happy throwing any crappy video chat up for broadcast, not matter how echoy the room you're in or how many drop-outs. WRT fiber optics, we are just now starting to see Q.com (Century Link) deploying fiber to the neighborhoods. Up in Canada in a similar sized city they deployed fiber back in 2000, but in the states QWest wouldn't do it because, I've been told, it would open up allowing CLECs to put DSL equipment in neighborhoods, and let them cherry-pick neighborhoods to offer service in. Finally a few years ago the city stepped in a ran fiber to every house, which honestly is a better option IMHO.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoI've had Quantum Fiber in Seattle for a year or two now. It's fantastic! Symmetrical upload/download, no data cap, 1gbps, and I pay something like $75/mo. I was paying $100/mo to Comcast for the same thing, though I had 1.2gbps down/35mbps up.
- wrycoder 2y agoIs your endpoint routable? Is the IP fixed or dynamic?
- volf_ 2y agoYes. Dynamic as the IP is renewed everytime your device resets
- linsomniac 2y ago
- ape4 2y agoNaive question: Was fiber always digital? I could imagine varying the intensity of the a laser signal to send sound.
- zabzonk 2y agobut ... why?
- ale42 2y agoSimpler and cheaper electronics, probably.
- declan_roberts 2y agoI can't imagine that subtle light intensity would survive the various light amplifiers used along the way.
- ooterness 2y agoRadio-frequency over fiber (RFoF) signals are usually analog. By intensity-modulating the laser, it's relatively easy to convert a GHz-wide analog signal from electrical to optical and back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_over_fiber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_over_fiber https://www.rp-photonics.com/radio_and_microwave_over_fiber.html https://www.rp-photonics.com/radio_and_microwave_over_fiber....