Article plays up the fumbling for effect, but is otherwise spot on. The PSTN was immensely overbuilt. Old Western Electric equipment is, literally, built of tempered steel, from the crossbar switches in the CO to the red telephone on the desk. The human artifice erected in between, electrically and mechanically connecting a microphone at one end to a speaker at the other, was staggering in its analog complexity, and yet it worked with astonishing reliability. And, to put it in modern terms, all of it was for just one single "app:" voice calls.
It all began moving to digital relatively early in the 60s, but even well into the 90s many systems were still functionally analog, with copper wire pairs carrying analog signals in a /not-metaphorical/ loop between callers.
Today we have comparatively infinitely greater capacity and capability, and there's no going back, but the "core experience" of the modern voice "app" is without a doubt a pale reflection of its original progenitor.
One thing not taken into account on this rant (and it is just a big rant) is the incredible increase in scale. Nearly everyone has a phone and can make phone calls now and we're almost 8 billion people. The old, understandable, analog system would have never scaled like this. Quality didn't degrade because of greed or degeneracy. It was a trade-off and I say the level of access we have now trumps whatever nostalgia people feel for the past decades.
You may be correct that we made the right choice with the tradeoff, but saying that the old system worked better (for those who could use it) is not nostalgia. Audio quality (and communication ability) on zoom is objectively far worse than it was over analog copper lines.
What? My Zoom call (I actually use MS-Teams) can include dozens of people, with video, who are from all over the world. The old phone system wasn't able to do that - especially at the cost of Zoom. People today would be shocked to know what our monthly phone bill cost was back in the day in today's dollars and the lack of value purchased for that money.
Not really. Transmissions were perhaps reliable, clear and fixed, low latency, but the bandwidth was still quite limited (64kbps). I still remember first time I used the yahoo! voice chat (VoIP using DSL on my end) with a decent sound card and head-set. It sounded like my peer was in the same room (1v1, voice only then -- with multi-party the sound quality degenerated quickly).
The reliability, clarity, and fixed low latency were nothing to sniff at, and ISDN didn't lose on quality by any means. In a different universe, it might have gone on to be a dominant technology.
The data rate was 64kbps. The audio frequency bandwidth of G.722, the most widely compatible codec over ISDN, is about 7kHz. Typical analog phone line bandwidth was about 3kHz, so a single ISDN BRI D-channel call was already twice the bandwidth of analog. This was sufficient for ISDN to be suitable for links between sports arenas and FM broadcast stations, for example. Other codecs with better compression (like MPEG) over bonded D-channels for 128kbps, could provide more like 20kHz audio bandwidth (in stereo!), which is close enough to "broadcast quality" 22kHz to be useful for coast-to-coast broadcasts and remote studio recording.
In our timeline, however, Carterfone and the breakup of AT&T opened the doors for all kinds of development in voice-band modem technology. 56K modems were good enough, and they worked with existing last-mile equipment on existing POTS lines, leaving ISDN to find a niche with small business and broadcast. When "always-on" DSL entered the market to compete for Internet subscribers, ISDN was finished. People cared more about data rates than latency, more about the Internet than point-to-point links, and the market ISDN was aiming for had moved on by the time it arrived. Rapid deployment of fiber and T1/E1 quickly ate up whatever was left of ISDN's apple... not because ISDN wasn't very good at what it did, just because people didn't much care about what it was good at.
Which, I suppose, brings us back to the point of the article: advances come with drawbacks.
Unconvinced. In the same room you wouldn't wear a head-set, would you? :-)
Also Mumble at 64kbps can sound really good. Anyways, didn't do/have that the time, so no comparison.
World population by late 1990s was 6 billion. Landline audio phone calls were reliable with fixed guaranteed bandwidth, albeit expensive. Today there are more people, but has there been a linear increase in 1:1 calls? More bridge/group/conferencing calls, yes.
But not in the 2nd/3rd world or in rural areas or poorer areas in the first. I would suggest that the ubiquity was in the wealthiest sections of the 1st world, not the western world.
There is also something incredibly "simple" about the end result of an analog connection - literally a pair of wires connected across thousands of miles.
Digitalization has added so many layers people don't even know - it's sad that there aren't many actual direct analog connections you can make anymore to see how "realtime" it was.
I remember overseas calls having a huge lag. Now I can call across and works and chat with perfect audio and video.
I think we’re romanticizing the past and failing to recognize the ways in which calls are so much better.
Yeah, the delay on digital phone calls still trips me up. It's nothing like being face-to-face or an analog call. I'll take the static, just give me sub-20ms latency!
Yes, this is the point I wanted to raise. It's not just phones. The first minute of everything is torture now. It takes minutes to turn on the TV and navigate menus and establish connections to sources and get to the point where everything is buffered and playing smoothly. I watch a lot less TV than I did when I was younger, despite the vastly expanded amount of content that is available, because it's just too much trouble.
Other appliances are similar. Playing music, you used to turn on the radio and maybe dial in a station. Or put a record on the turntable, or a cassette tape in the deck and press "Play".
Appliances much the same. You had power and maybe one or two analog dial controls. Controls in your car were the same. Everything was tactile. Feedback was both physical and immediate. Nothing needed accounts or logins or apps to use.
It doesn't have to be. If your devices support HDMI-CEC[0], then you can turn on 1 device and everything sets itself up. For example, I can turn on my PS4 and it automatically turns on the TV and sets the correct input.
Because phones aren't allowed to have bezels anymore for some reason, I'm constantly hanging up on people because there's no room for a proximity sensor to turn off the screen so my cheek presses the "hang up" button. It tries to use the front camera as a makeshift sensor, but it doesn't work very well.
Recently I reacted with incredulity when the people on the other end could properly hear me through a newly-connected Bluetooth device -- it's more jarring to me when this stuff doesn't fail.
Same happens to me with the mute button. It also seems hard on newer phones to find a position where the speaker is clear - shift it by a millimetre and now you can’t hear anything. The phone is so big that holding it completely still for a long call is uncomfortable. People ask why everyone holds the phone out and uses the loudspeaker now, well…
Worse yet, the "muted" and "not muted" states of the button are visually distinct when looking at them side-by-side, but if you just see one in isolation, you'd be hard-pressed to determine which it is. Gotta poke it a few times to see it change, you know?
That's not problem of a bezel, but either crappy software or bad sensor, never happened to me through 11+ years of using Android phones with touch screen.
Better choose decent phone next time, mind sharing what phone causes you this trouble?
Samsung Galaxy S10e (with recent software). It wasn't cheap. And all my previous Android phones were fine too, but this one only has the little hole in the screen for the camera. There is no sensor.
Not sure if the device really is the issue here. I've the same phone, it costed me $600 when I bought it 3.5 years back. And till date, it's the best phone I've owned: not too big, headphone jack, expendable storage, physical dual sim, capable cameras and Touch ID that's located just right. Importantly, I've never had issues that you mentioned (dropped calls or Bluetooth glitches for that matter)
I use this phone (S10e) every single day for calls and music etc. In fact, I'm typing my response on it now
What I mean to say is - there's a very high chance that your device is broken.
You may be using different software version, maybe they fixed it. It was very popular model, I really doubt if it had such serious issues it would not be fixed.
But considering not all people have this problem it's either software error, software setting or some batches had hardware issue or they fixed the design.
I know it's not using a proximity sensor because the front camera turns on when it's trying to fake-proximity-sense. I also know what a proximity sensor looks like (I've worked with such sensors for my job), and there isn't one. It's just a bad design; form overrode function.
S10 series should have under screen proximity sensor, so there is no way for you to see it unless it lights up during function, it's white flashing LED
I do sympathize with users who have to distinguish between the kind of brokenness that warrants returning the phone, and the kind of brokenness which is simply the norm in this space.
S10e definitely has a hw proximity sensor under the screen, but Samsung also adds infos from touchscreen to complement this sensor. I used a s10e and loved it, but not on Samsung sw and I never did calls so I can't say much about it.
The point is parent's generalization is wrong because it's either caused by faulty hardware or software issue, but it's not widespread problem across all new (Android) smartphones, just because you and him experience this issue.
Also just throwing my hat into the ring, writing this on a S10e. It's not perfect, but I don't have any issues with the sensors, no ads, and it generally just works about as well as any other phone I've used.
Circa 2012, top 60% of an Android call screen was unresponsive to touch and never had phantom touches. As the buttons creeped upward, I get phantom mute, hold and even hangups.
My father's phone had the same problem (some HTC abomination), but with the mute button rather than the end call button. I'm not sure if it was due to cheek contact with the screen or some gyro sensor thinking that the phone was flipped upside down, but during a call the phone would randomly mute its microphone.
Yes. It is either Hang up, Mute, or Worst, suddenly on speaker phone so the sound would blow up my ear.
There are many other aspect of "calling" that has gotten worst, including call quality, codec and signal etc. My thinking is that no one calls anymore and no one gives a damn about phone calling.
I still remember I used to buy Motorola Phone just because of their Crystal talk.
Personally I think it was two things reinforcing each other:
On one side, a natural decline in people using the phone (replaced by texting/apps)
On the other side: the cell companies no longer “encumbered” by laws around landline reliability, cramming ever more phone calls in to the same amount of bandwidth
The cell companies could have the clearest call quality by a wide margin, if they chose to. TBH, (and I know I’m an outlier) even though I talk to people for maybe 5 hours a month, I would still switch providers to one that offered call a quality equivalent to being in person
> suddenly on speaker phone so the sound would blow up my ear.
This being so bad is a phone design issue that goes beyond the touchscreen.
Well designed phones have two microphones and speakers, so when in speakerphone the top becomes the mic and the bottom the speaker, preventing deafening people in the event of an accidental switch.
The stock Android dialer is a complete UX hellscape.
Every other time I need to dial a number, I will be randomly interrupted by some dialogue to enable a feature or to learn about X, when I'm urgently trying to make a call. It's so f-ing rude and intrusive. And it's designed to trick you into enabling shit without giving you time to think it over.
It's such a scummy thing to do, but hey, it's Google. Imagine having to make an emergency phone call, but you can't until you tap through all the prompts. Google basically broke core functionality to do this, and there's no way to disable this nonsense.
Seriously, I just want my phone to be a phone, not some feature riddled shit app that does everything (poorly).
Are you sure that's Google and not your device manufacturer or your carrier? The dialer on my Android phone seems OK. I'm not going to claim it's the best UX ever, but it certainly doesn't interrupt me with dialogs about anything. Android phones are infamous for having carrier-required crap pre-loaded.
I switched from LG to a pixel. I don't regret the better hardware or more frequent updates, but so many tiny things were substantially better on the LG.
Biggest peeve: on the LG phones I had, you could use the volume buttons / menu to silence or turn down individual applications. On the pixel, out of the box you only get a global media volume control.
Also have experience with the stock phone dialler putting up prompts while I am in the middle of doing something else, which never happened on LG. The other big annoyance is the timer portion of the clock app is significantly harder to use.
All that said, I will happily take stock android on the pixel any day over any Samsung product.
Notice how in this conversation, no precise program name or version was brought up. "The stock dialer on an LG", "the dialer on a Pixel"...
On a computer (a real computer), the first words would be something like "On Firefox 106.0.2 64-bit", but phones have such abysmal user control that most of the time we don't even know what programs we're running.
To be honest, I'd have to do some digging around to get exact versions of a fair amount of my software on my latop- much of it isn't immediately surfaced in the UI, and where it was installed from could be from several places.
In android, every app version is found in the exact same place on my phone:
Settings > Apps > (select an app) > very bottom has version number. App details takes you to the full details page in the play store, which shows the full name of the app and the publisher name.
Yea, I feel like there's a big cargo cult element to the claims of carrier skins being crapware by default. I remember the moment I realized that the moto x (first post-Google moto phone) and the contemporary galaxy s both had solid advantages over the pixel. Eg Samsung beat pixel to the quick settings menu by YEARS (and by extension iOS by even more years), and this is now an industry standard.
I have strong suspicion you are not talking about Google's android dialer but some chinese ad-infested knock-off. When I used to have crappy Xiaomi, I had ads everywhere - settings, basic 'android' apps, most probably dialer too, definitely SMS sending app and so on. Threw it away and never looked back.
There are premium androids who give users completely different experience, be it Samsung, Sony, Google etc etc etc. Literally hundreds of models to pick your match. On my S22 ultra I never saw a single similar ad since I bought it. I wish people stopped bashing android just because they cheaped out and then found out that cheap phones are actually cheap to get revenue back in baked-in ads (there are other concerns coming from Google as creator but that's a different topic, since there is no saints among phone manufacturers and lure of ads revenue is too strong even for Apple)
Samsung phones were actually highly ad laden until they realised it was hurting their brand about a year or two before you bought yours. I'm expecting ads to slowly slip back in.
Xiaomi makes fine hardware with overly intrusive firmware installed on it which they sell for competitive prices. The solution is the same as with any other Android device: install one of the many AOSP-derived distributions on it and you have fine hardware with clean firmware offering OTA updates and more freedom than any vendor-supplied distribution offers, not to mention waaaay more freedom than the Apple/iOS combo offers.
Yeah but as father of small children, camera that is always in the pocket is hugely important for me. AFAIK Xiaomi camera app/drivers/whatever is the proper name is a signed blob that has no source available, so something more basic is used instead in those free distros. Thus photo quality suffers since its finely tuned for given sensors/lens/cpu combo. At least that's how I grokked it few years ago.
Since then I've realized phone is by far the most important device in my life, so not cheaping out on it anymore and seeing the difference in every photo.
That must be the Google Dialer app. The one in LineageOS which I guess comes from AOSP is perfectly fine and never bothers me about anything. Come to the dark side! ;-)
What about iOS where you cant copy in a number and then edit it? Every time I want to call a foreign number and need to add a country code I need to make a new contact and then edit that.
This one drives me crazy in all iOS phone number entry type situations. once you've dialed in the the 10 numbers, it makes it into whatever that little bubble is called that makes it no longer editable. you have to delete the whole bubble of 10 digits, and start typing the whole number again instead of being able to edit the probably single digit that needs correcting.
However, I'm old enough to remember the pain of recognizing a mis-dialed number from rotary phones. Old enough to remember only needing to dial 5 digits. Then the pain of having to dial the full prefix going to 7 digits, growing to full horror going to full 10 digit. luckily by 10 digit, touch tone was in place.
My parents technically don't have a four digit local number any more, but it's the same† national number as it was back then. BT moved two digits from the exchange code to the local part when they digitised the exchange.
†: All UK national numbers gained an extra '1' after the leading '0'; I'm asserting that change doesn't count.
Ohh. And if you think you're so clever and type that prefix before Paste-ing, it doesn't just paste, but replaces all digits you have typed. I also love it when sites omit a country code in their numbers like "(xxx) xxx-xxxx". Well, at least it's not a jpeg.
What phone are you using? That sounds like a terrible experience, I'll need to make sure I avoid it.
For what it's worth, you can install a new dialer from the Play Store. Or you can grab an open source one from F-Droid. The Simple apps are quite popular because they just do one thing and do it well, i.e. https://f-droid.org/packages/com.simplemobiletools.dialer/
Pixel 7 Pro, but I wouldn't avoid it because their dialer sucks. It's still a really good phone when compared to the iPhone/Samsung Galaxy/etc., and it's the only Android phone series I'd consider in the future.
When I had a Samsung Galaxy, I installed the full suite of Simple apps onto it because the included apps sucked so bad. Simple gets it mostly right from a UI/UX perspective, and I was happy to support the author by purchasing the apps in the Play store.
That's a great dialer, but unfortunately one cannot choose a default phone number for a contact with it. So for contacts with multiple phone numbers (and that's most of my important contacts, your use case might be different) one must choose with number to dial each time that person is called.
And instead of option to pick dialer, be stuck with the crappy one provided by Apple(lack of spam detection, lack of business directory), with no option to change. Great idea.
Right, but the underlying engine doesn’t matter much practically speaking. I don’t think I’ve ever run into a situation where the browser on iOS limited me from doing things I would want to do on mobile.
I use FireFox on iOS because it syncs with FireFox on my laptop.
I disagree, plenty of posts here that start with "doesn't work on my iPhone".
Apple forces you to adjust to their terrible browser engine by taking away your users' ability to install another browser. Many websites put in the effort to make their stuff work on Apple devices but that's far from a given.
You're probably talking about some chinese dialer on top of android, Google one is clean and essential.
One thing I always struggle with is that phone becomes painfully slow and heats up like crazy on a call. The one thing it should do without effort seems like the heavier one on the hardware. Wonder how they managed to do phone calls 20-30 years ago if it's such a compute intensive task.
To be fair, a good chunk of Android in total is a UX hellscape. This coming from a lifelong Android user. One of Android's greatest strengths (customization) is also it's greatest weakness.
The article makes a great point early on: hearing voices over VOIP is markedly different than over analog phone lines. The robotic voice and the weird compression when your connection isn't good are common for me. Worst of all is the 0.5-1 second delay I still sometimes hear, on local calls no less!
If the same call was being had over a phone line and we were in the same country, the audio fidelity would be excellent.
The key word there being analog phone lines. Cell phone lines, which account for 99.99999% of all phone communication these days, are IMO worse than VOIP for sound quality (though better at latency). It's weird that kids growing up in the post-landline era will never realize how clear and amazingly low-latency phone calls used to be. If two people were seated across a table talking on a landline, they'd hear the signal from the phone before they heard it over the air.
No, the key words are uncompressed and non-packetized. The best telephone voice quality ever was ISDN from handset to handset. Digital end to end, 64Kb/s without compression, and rigidly clocked at the bit level. No noise. No jitter. Switzerland had ISDN to the home for years. Also, in Europe, there was power over ISDN, so the phone didn't need AC power or batteries.
A friend there was annoyed when they forced him to convert to inferior VoIP, which, even over fiber, is worse.
In Ireland, until _weirdly recently_, after ISDN had died out for pretty much all other purposes, every government minister got an ISDN phone installed in their house, to make them easier to interview in the radio.
Low-latency for local calls, yes. High quality sound, also yes.
But for long distance, no thank you. I will not go back to the 90s just for that one reason alone. It was hellish calling across the Atlantic. Like 15 cents a minute with a 1.5 (sometimes 2) second delay between speaking. And having to remember the dialling sequences and complexity around looking up foreign phone numbers, both of which are now just built into the cell phone.
Or having to trudge around in the rain for a phone booth and having to page through a worn out phone book just to make some dinner reservations. Yuck. I'll take the bluetooth shenanigans, thank you.
Or having to trudge around in the rain for a phone booth and having to page through a worn out phone book just to make some dinner reservations. Yuck.
Pretending like this was the only way to make a dinner reservation reminds me of the juice loosener informercial from the Simpsons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viejY6UZ5Bk
I didn't pretend it was the only way, I was saying that there are times when one is out and needs to make reservations or call the wife that went into labour or call work after a car broke down. These were actual, real things people did back then. Thankfully I'm young enough to only have had to do it for a couple of years, but I do not have Merry England syndrome around what phones were like in the mid nineties.
In the 90ies I used 'calling cards' to 'dial in' to Frankfurt, and then via touch tone entry of the real number to Florida. Interestingly that wasn't only ridiculously cheap, but much better quality than dialed directly via my native Telco/ISP. Also no latency, sounded almost as good as native ISDN.
VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in. This has repeated for every single "improvement" in VoIP technology over its ~40 year history, the tradeoff always goes in the direction of making more money instead of offering better service.
If you're calling within the same carrier with "HD voice", AMR-WB at 12.65kbps scores a higher MOS than old-school G.711 64kbps PCM (and is more pleasing in some ways that the MOS doesn't capture).
Sure, if they'd just give us another couple dang kilobits/second it'd be way better still, but...
At this point, the bandwidth used for voice is pretty much irrelevant from a cellular capacity planning point of view-- people use >5GB/month on average and 24/7 12kbps calling is less than 5GB/month.
> VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in.
Not just that, it’s also used for additional carrier lock-in!
(In Canada, carriers were barred from selling carrier-locked phones some years ago, but since VoLTE, they don’t support VoLTE functionality on any phones that haven’t been certified for use on their network, which is limited, in practice, to phone models that they sell themselves. Normally this means you fallback to 3G for calling, unless you happen to be roaming with a carrier/country where 3G service has been dropped, in which case you simply don’t get any voice service.)
It's wild when I'm talking to family on Signal, which seems to run high quality VoIP even on a non-VoLTE-capable phone. (and the hardware seems to be VoLTE-capable, just Sprint never released the appropriate modem firmware _in my market_, and I've been unsuccessful at hacking apart a rom from india...)
But as nice as the quality may be, the latency still sucks. It's just the nature of the beast.
I have to agree. People forget how many frequencies made it through the Bell System and the wire lines. Maybe long ago it was 100% analog, but somewhere along the way they started adding in digital compression and that usually meant stripping out all but the most important frequencies. There were several decades when a dial phone to dial phone call produced pretty horrible accoustics.
Clarity and latency are at odds here. Digital can, with enough bitrate, encode more clarity than your ear can hear. Radio stations use two-channel ISDN for remote studio links so it sounds like the interviewer and interviewee are in the same room, sometimes you'd never know they aren't unless they announce it.
But ISDN is all but gone, and all other digital voice systems are packetized and suffer awful, terrible, excruciating, reflex-fumbling latency. No matter how clear they are, I'm forever tripping on — no you go — okay as I was — go ahead — um okay — aaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
> ISDN-BRI never gained popularity as a general use telephone access technology in Canada and the US, and remains a niche product. The service was seen as "a solution in search of a problem", and the extensive array of options and features were difficult for customers to understand and use. ISDN has long been known by derogatory backronyms highlighting these issues, such as It Still Does Nothing, Innovations Subscribers Don't Need, and I Still Don't kNow, or, from the supposed standpoint of telephone companies, I Smell Dollars Now.
Wow, that explains everything why Americans insist that analog is the way. I will always miss ISDN, but the march of technology insist on IP I guess.
Zoom is entirely dependent on whatever hardware the participants are using. My team switched to using cardioid mics and the audio quality is stellar. It's just when you get that one guy dialing in on his mobile phone with an old pair of wired earbuds with the cord mic that's not anywhere near his mouth. Usually from India, with horns in the background...
Yeah definitely. Well we haven't had analogue phone lines for decades but compared to landlines, mobile can be much better - especially now we have HD Voice which landlines (and call centres apparently) can't access. Maybe it's the extra echo cancellation that's the real problem.
I agree about the delay that sometimes (way more often than it should) occurs in digital calls, but the voice quality of analog calls was shit. It was band limited to something like 8kHz (so maximum of 4kHz signal making it to your ear). That seems like a lot, but it really isn't. There's a significant amount of high end that gets lost and makes everything seem muddled. I remember making calls over 22kHz audio codecs in the late 90s and the quality of even that (maximum frequency transmitted being 11kHz) was way better than an analog phone call.
If you want to see an example of cellphone latency, watch your local news. When they send a reporter to cover a remote story these days, they nearly always use a cellphone as a camera (cheap, ubiquitous, good image quality, and they don't need to pay a separate camera operator).
When the anchor in the studio says "And now over to Lester, who is reporting from the scene" - there's a 1-2 second delay before we hear and see Lester respond.
Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails.
It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email.
It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail.
The subject line takes only 15 seconds to write but will significantly reduce receiver anxiety, both synchronously and asynchronously. Sending a text after the call is not the same because it’s not in context.
I remember proposing this to WhatsApp while I was working at FB but the WhatsApp culture seemed uninterested in feature ideas of any kind. Hopefully someone else does it eventually.
>It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function.
No, it's not. You sound like a dinosaur. A phone's primary functions are 1) text-messaging apps, 2) camera, 3) dating apps, 4) banking apps, and various others. Phone calls are somewhere around #20.
The way I like to look at it is: Imagine a world where the concept of a phone call never existed. Then, suddenly someone invents an app that:
1. Allows an instant, full-screen foreground takeover over whatever else you are currently doing on the device
2. Rings and vibrates your device
3. Has a button that could allow an unknown person to send and receive audio to and from your device
4. All of this is triggered remotely, from anyone in the world, without any kind of user identification or authentication, besides a spoofable number
No app store's rules in either major ecosystem would allow such an abusive app. Yet, only because the legacy concept of a "phone call" exists, not only is the app allowed, but it's preloaded on every device out there!
The phone feature is a legacy feature that goes away with 2G. Soon carriers will only be moving data.
The providers have data to show that the phone functionality is not a primary use case. It is a legacy product whose overhead has a real cost on our economy.
When do we stop paying $10-$20 a month per lines of service, for the privileging of being interrupted? When do we stop calling it a smartphone and treating as such and recognizing it as as computer, a laptop for your pocket.
I expect those born in the last century to be most resistant to the deprecation of the 'phone call' as a concept. People also reminisced about having phone lines that were partied together. Imagine what scammers would do with that today.
I doubt people from the last century are the ones holding on to the idea of a phone call.
Whatever telcos are doing these days would have led to jail time in the 1990s.
I would like to see a return to the government passing QOS laws for safety critical services, then enforcing them.
Since everyone is dunking on twitter these days: How is it legal for them to slap an auth wall on top of emergency response agencies' feeds? If I MITM'ed the emergency broadcast system with such bullshit, I'd go to jail. Twitter is used during emergencies by at least 100x more people than emergency broadcast.
Unfortunately it kind of fails at being a good pocket computer (all else aside they got rid of the concept of files and replaced it with nothing). The fact that it fails at being a phone too is just adding insult to injury.
Definitely not. It depends on who you and your circle of friends are, of course, but dating apps are definitely way higher usage than phone calls among anyone I know. I use my phone as a phone less than half a dozen times per year. If the phone functionality vanished, I don't think I would mind.
the disconnect is that you're not able to see outside your bubble. Your average iphone or android user is using the phone function far more than dating apps
How do we know who is in a bubble? :) When I walk around downtown, I see hundreds of people on their phones, and maybe one or two of them is actually using it as a phone. Obviously I don't know if they're on dating apps specifically, but they are enormously popular, so it seems plausible.
No, they're not. In the country I'm living in, *no one* uses phone calls except for rare things like delivery people calling because the box doesn't fit in your apartment's delivery boxes. Absolutely no one under the age of 50 uses voice calling to talk to their friends or family; they all use LINE texting.
I haven't taken a phone call in over a month now (from the Amazon delivery guy). I use dating and texting apps every day. For actual talking to friends/family, I use voice and video chat functions in chat apps.
Something on that order, yeah. Looking through my phone's call log, I had a call with a friend in mid-August, and another with another friend in mid-July. Prior to that was a call with my mom in April and that's as far back as the log goes.
Phone = Telephone:
The term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, "far" and φωνή, phōnē, "voice", together meaning "distant voice".
Distant voice communication is the entire purpose for a phone.
Just because you want or expect your phone to do more, doesn’t make your desires the primary function of the device.
And geometry is from the Greek γῆ (gê) 'earth, land', and μέτρον (métron) 'a measure', referring to it's original use as a tool for surveying farm plots in flood plains. It's obviously expanded much past that original definition to the point now that the original definition is simply one small application of the tool. In fact an application that the vast majority of practitioners will never administer.
Is there a 5-6 inch pad available? If not, then that's not an alternative, can't shove a 10 inch tablet into my pocket. And while it's called a phone, the primary function for many (dare I say most?) is definitely not doing voice calls, hell my phone app icon isn't even on the homescreen anymore, that's how little I use this device for phone calls and I use it for hours every day otherwise.
Hmm, I was going to get back to you with a list, but it seems most of the 6-inchers have been discontinued. The Amazon Fire 6 would have been the most prominent example.
There are some, but none of them would be suitable for consumer use.
>Besides, how would you handle calls from landlines and such?
Direct to voicemail, of course, with a message saying 'text me' for automatic transcription. As they say, its a feature not a bug [to not be interrupted]. In a perfect world I'd have a secretary or AI to screen calls on my behalf, but I don't.
Ironically, you almost do. Last week I updated my S22 to Android 13, and one of the new features Samsung claims to have implemented[0] is to have Bixby pick the call for you, transcribe what the caller says, and display it on screen, giving you a choice to pick up the call, or type/select a reply that Bixby will then say to the caller. With spam call detection being an established feature for years already, the ingredients for your AI assistant are already there.
Now that I think of it, I might actually try this the next time a telemarketer calls.
----
[0] - I haven't actually tested it, nor seen it in action - just saw it being mentioned when I reviewed "Tips" app after update.
As a phone, all cell phones are terrible. In the wired-phone era companies used to advertise on call quality. Nobody does that any more because the quality of cell phone calls is so abysmal that text with (or without frankly) emojis is an order of magnitude better for communication.
If they made pads the size of my phone that could still use cell network internet and that I could put a custom OS on I'd consider it.
People who never experienced a really good connection when no more than a little of the phone & switching network was digitized, surely have no idea what they're missing. I've never once heard a call since that era that was as good—VOIP, Zoom, cell network, modern POTS network, whatever.
t's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function.
Not for about fifteen years or so, no. I don't even have the Phone app on the front page of my iPhone, let alone allow it to sit in the dock. Regardless, whatever the primary function of the device, there is room for improvement over "it's always worked that way".
> If you don't want that, wouldn't a pad be a better option than a phone?
1) Do they make devices that aren't phones that are the size of a note"pad"? The smallest non-phone tablet devices are now (with the death of iPod touch) the size of (at best) a small note"book", not a sensibly-sized-for-portable-usage note"pad".
2) That doesn't even solve the problem as tons of Internet-connected messaging software now supports calls, so I feel like you are missing the point in some sense: the person you are responding to is seriously talking about WhatsApp!
“Receiver anxiety” should crawl off into the forest. It’s a youth-millennial thing that inhibits waaaay too much authentic social action. People are just too scared to be human. Just call me! I might pick up I might not.
For that matter, if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. It’s just e-mail.
My mother had no issues calling someone but her parents were upset when she started listening to that damn rock and roll. The youth thing inhibits way too much authentic music. People are just scared to listen to the oldies. /s
Différent generations have different norms and it’s not right or wrong.
This sort of relativism of all norms, mores, morals, and ethics needs to stop. There are some cultural and social norms/mores that are better than others. We know this, because empirically some produce better outcomes than others. Mass-scale social anxiety at having to interact with another human being is NOT healthy for society, and is likely the underlying cause for a significant amount of the current social ills that are either new or increasing over time.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess 17 year olds who can’t call people aren’t the reason for societies problems. Certainly less to blame than the 45yo’s who bemoan them.
Every generation thought that society was collapsing. Despite that, time progresses, people age out of the population and a new generation is born. And society (mostly) doesn’t collapse.
When I was 17 I spent like an hour emailing a teacher telling her I’d be late on an assignment by a day. Because I was very anxious about writing an email to a “superior” and didn’t know how it’d go, or what the “right” email looked like.
Now I email hundreds of times a day, and have constantly shifted deadlines to no professional detriment. I still get nervous emailing a new important person, but you do it anyways.
Do people really forget what it’s like being young? Sometimes you just grow up and move on.
a few generations ago, there was a moral panic that the kids weren’t all right because rock and roll music was corrupting. It was loud, vulgar, etc and therefore wrong.
My point was to emphasize how across generations, everyone seems to think that the youth have bad norms and it’s somehow wrong, and then they grow up and the world keeps spinning, and the cycle repeats.
It’s awfully vain to think that the norms of your generation in your nation at your point in time are magically the ”better” ones.
The parent comment reference a novel idea that phone calls could have a subject line. It’s novel, it’s clever, it would solve many problems beyond just “people are scared to be human”. The world moves on, and we can improve it or we can launch ad hominem attacks on the next generation.
I read your email, got interrupted, and did not reply. Then I forgot about it.
If you email me again, it might get read at a more convenient time, and I'll answer.
Same reason I might not answer your call: I'm busy with something else or not near my phone at the moment. This used to be normal by the way -- if I called your home phone and nobody answered, I'd have no choice but to call again later.
I miss a very high percentage of legitimate email messages from people because I don't receive many of them (half a dozen per year?) and get like 20-30 spam and mistyped-address emails per day (that's after the spam filters), so I don't pay much attention to it unless I'm expecting something.
Humans I know contact me through whatsapp. Or if they're old (and hell, I'm almost 40, so I mean old) through text or phone. Strangers' only real hope is text. I'll probably miss anything else. And even that is getting so goddamn spammy now that it's not far from being like email: only useful if I'm already expecting a message. I receive stupid political ads for states I've never lived in a couple times a day.
It isn’t visually present in the list of 50-100 emails in my inbox. Mail again and remind. It’s not rude. It’s rude to assume the other person is ignoring.
I don't have a problem with phone calls but if someone unexpected engages with me on the street or in a hallway I kind of freeze for long enough that we have walked past each other and then realize that was a bit rude but its too late now.
I like the idea, but it will never take off. People are fundamentally lazy when it comes to these things. Look at the surging popularity of voice messages in some circles, shifting the burden of communication fully to the receiver. Even if you had the feature, I'd wager most subject lines would stay empty, or just contain the bare minimum like "hi".
That’s ok. Metadata improves context but isn’t mandatory. Some people want it, others don’t bother.
It’s like sending a calendar invite. Sure, you can send an invite with nothing but your email address and a date+time. But many people would find an empty invite a bit rude. It’s just polite to include some context about the meeting. The phone call should evolve in that direction.
If it's not mandatory, then what's the point? You can already send text messages if the message is important. And since it's optional, both spammers and your lazy family will leave it blank making it useless to filter out spam.
It doesn't have to be a burden. My watch already provides me a quick-select list of responses. So when I make a call, instead of one generic send button, how about two? One of them labeled "this is a emergency" or something like that. Maybe even a little list of a half dozen of the most commonly used subjects, so I just click the one that matches.
No reason to make people work any harder than they do now.
But if other people are lazy, why would I entertain interruptions from them? I generally don’t do any work voice or video calls because, simply, they are an interruption. So they need to have an agenda and be scheduled. And indeed, I do not listen to voice messages; type it out or don’t send it at all.
Phone calls from unknown numbers go straight to voice mail. Same for some people who think it’s fair game to call me and bore my ears off with their life whilst I am working.
This is a solution very dependent on individual preferences, though, it is not any kind of blanket solution.
I once called my brother from a phone that was not mine, in the middle of the night, to inform him that our brother had died suddenly. He did not answer. He got that message in the morning when he checked his voicemail after waking up. He was very upset at the delay.
Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.
> I once called my brother from a phone that was not mine, in the middle of the night, to inform him that our brother had died suddenly. He did not answer. He got that message in the morning when he checked his voicemail after waking up. He was very upset at the delay.
Well, sometimes shit happen. I can think of a handful of scenarios where I cannot be contacted and it’s right that sometimes it could be important. But I am not living on alert 24/7 because sometimes someone might die. My filtering system lets the second call through, which I think works fine as most spammers do not call twice within one minute. That said, in the middle of the night I still probably would not hear, but not because of that.
(I am sure that the situation was complex and difficult to manage enough for you to have to borrow a phone, and I do not envy you for having gone through it and am sorry you had to. In that situation I would be very upset regardless of the delay).
> Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.
That’s entirely right and I agree completely. But then we are where we are and the world often disagrees with me. Otherwise I could also get rid of my ads and trackers blockers.
Then I add an exception for ______. If they cannot tell you their number (happens with some companies), then they can:
- arrange a call, which is great because then I am guaranteed to have the time to deal with the topic, I do that sometimes with my bank;
- leave a voice mail, which is not great but then I am not responsible for their phone number policy (nobody leaves voice mail anymore);
- send an email (or a SMS, a WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Skype, whatever, I am not picky), possibly to arrange a phone call, also great because I can answer written messages on my own terms and not when they feel like calling me;
- (most of the time these days) have a chat over whatever IM platform they integrated into their website.
My time is not theirs to use however they want. If they want me to be on call, that’s fine, but with compensation.
I think the problem there is that a lot of people just won't bother. Some people would just put "pick up" on that subject line, or leave it empty (surely you wouldn't make it mandatory, nobody would accept that), or any number of things.
I personally hate unscheduled calls, and I'd love it if everyone sent a text first to check if you're free for a call, and only call after you've accepted, but... that's just never gonna happen.
"It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail."
Well, what is stopping your wife from also texting you, if it was something important and she did not reach you? And what would force her, to use a potential subject line?
Otherwise it is an interesting idea, but I doubt it will be a killer feature, as most would simply ignore it.
> Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails.
Pixel phones have call screening feature. It can be enabled for all calls or unknown callers. It asks the caller to state the reason they are calling and notifies you with the text of the reason given and you can choose whether to accept or reject.
If you want something more then you could just ask callers to text you instead.
I like where you're going with this, and particularly with the increase of video calls, it's still strange to just pick up and see a person.
The flow I get people into is to communicate via text (slack, whatsapp, etc depending on the nature of the environment) with a "hey, is now a good time to call", or "I wanted to discuss XYZ", and we can then hash out the best method for communication.
The authors complaint is valid, but I think it is more of a UX issue, similar to what you're suggesting here.
This feature would be super useful, since nobody I would ever willingly talk to would use it I could dump all calls with subjects to voicemail (and then not check it).
Upon reading just the title, I thought this is going to be about prolonged, slowly spoken automatic pre-IVR messages, which appeared during COVID with "due to the current situation, we kindly ask you to be patient because we're understaffed and have more calls".
Now it's just unspoken "you learned how to wait during COVID so fuck you and wait", often mentioning opening hours, even when you call during those hours, website address and other nonsense before a human is even notified about a phone call at the other end.
Fuck you and wait.
> Instead, this: Hello? … Wait, hello? Can you hear me? Okay, hold on. Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it. Okay, never mind, I’ll just hold it up to my head. Hi, ugh, sorry about that.
Noone I know has these issues. The author seems to be impaired in smartphone handling or the US cell infrastructure started to suck. No such issues in Europe to my knowledge. These sound like the issues with Zoom and Meet, not phones. "Can you hear me? Can you see me? Am I presenting?".
I think it's more likely that they've bought more accessories than you and get bit by more incompatibilities. I think the issue is that there's nobody designing the entire end-to-end experience of what happens when you use every accessory with every feature turned on. I'm sure there's QA on all of it, but tickets don't magically create an architecture.
> Instead, this: Hello? … Wait, hello? Can you hear me? Okay, hold on. Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it. Okay, never mind, I’ll just hold it up to my head. Hi, ugh, sorry about that.
i had basically this same problem just yesterday. for years i would take calls with wired earbuds that had an integrated mic. i upgraded my iphone and now i have to use one of those lightning to 3.5mm adapters for that. the official adapters last for like 2-3 months until they begin flaking. not usually a deal-breaker, because it just means ~0.5s of lost audio every couple minutes but…
a recent iOS update made it so that if the earpiece disappears during a call then the OS drops the call. so i had to redial 3 times during my call. eventually we switched to Facetime, which still disconnects me upon audio drops but leaves the other side connected so that i just have to press “join” instead of redialing.
not an infra issue, but it adds up to the same crappy call experience.
There needs to be a Big(O) table for UX. Number of user interactions and decisions to get to each functionality in each screen size. Then comes prioritization. You can only fit so many buttons and boxes close to the hottest zones of user interaction, especially on Mobile, and even less of them in advertising-powered products.
When someone prioritizes the wrong use case on premium real estate and pushes back buttons that matter to you more, that only gets worse over time - your needs are not their priority.
That is why on mobile at least the giants are not always giant enough to squish competition entirely - one can always provide a better UX than Facebook or Google with a small but focused app that works for your problem better. The real damage to competition comes from device apis that put UX overhead to use cases you serve bette than them, but then give their apps with the same use case UX priority in their next release.
Just like data and code, complexity increases for UX with each added user story and use case, but the screen space remains the same.
I work in UX and I can tell you the people managing these design teams have never even heard the term 'Big-O' much less understand it; in my sphere I find they are mostly interested in boosting engagement metrics on whatever new feature will get them sooner promoted before they exit to the next company and do the same thing.
Create maligned reward system, get maligned work. It's not like our field doesn't have resume driven development, and honestly why would you do anything else? Doing good work for your employer only pays if it literally pays. If your employer and the market rewards launching features, products, and making metrics go up then why toil away needlessly making money for someone else?
I haven't done user interface design, in anger, for 20+ years. Before the kids renamed it "UX" (old wine, new bottles).
Anywho. We used to consider Fitts' Law, Hick's Law, and so forth. Celebrity UI designers (ahem) like Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen would belabor these seemingly obvious design considerations ad nauseum.
Your Big-O suggestion could be a nice heuristic for scoring and ranking design alternatives. Cool.
Not that design intent ever mattered. The age old tale remains the same. Grind, iterate, validate. (Does anyone do usability testing any more?) Voilá!
Then some PHB doing drive-by mgmt decrees "Those buttons should be cornflower blue. I like the old font better. Just change it all back."
I eventually rage quit UI work. Preferring to have my good taste, experience, skill, and efforts denigrated in other domains.
It now occurs to me the audience for all that UI design advice was our bosses, not us practitioners. For appeals to authority. For populating our bookshelves, to exude the facsimile of learnedness.
My impression is that it's all quantitative post-fact A/B testing nowadays.
What is interesting, because it was widely known that quantitative usability research was mostly waste and you were much better doing 10 times the amount of it with only qualitative results.
What was not widely discussed¹ is that post-fact testing is also almost useless. It can only tell you what solution is better, but the real gain comes from discovering what problems exist.
My golden rules to make videoconferencing more reliable :
- Use ethernet. Wi-Fi isn't reliable, your neighbor's microwave can ruin everything.
- Use wired headphones. 0 latency. 0 connection time. And disables the mic noise-cancelling algos.
- Use classic phone calls when required. It's more robust and latency is even better.
Wired headphones or nothing. I know they're connected because I can see them physically connected. They're charged because photons can move through wires. It's the right protocol because they fit in the device.
Apple gets props for making it break less often than everyone else but it's a fundamentally broken UI and broken protocol.
Any tips on using ethernet when you're renting a house and unable to wire any infrastructure? My only hookup for internet is in a pretty poor spot for wireless connectivity to my office, but I don't have a good way to wire a cable instead since there's an entire living room, a staircase, a hallway, and multiple doors in the way.
Run cables along baseboards, under rugs, under doors, along the stair runners, etc. If the cable needs to cross an egress point, put a rug over it. If you can convince your landlord, drill a single hole to bridge the upstairs and downstairs. If you're in an older house that has straight cold air returns (not a heating duct), drop a cable through there, and pin it to the crown molding.
Does the house have coax wiring for cable tv? If so, get a pair of MoCA Ethernet adapters. I have 2.5Gbps ones running across a large house and they are rocksolid reliable.
First one doesn't really hold in my opinion, 5GHz WiFi has been available for over a decade and won't be interrupted by a microwave. Probably easier to upgrade to a relatively recent WiFi setup than connecting a cable in most cases.
When you're on speaker, most platforms have a noise cancelling algorithm to prevent Larsen loops between mic and speaker. Using headphones usually disables it.
> Wi-Fi isn't reliable, your neighbor's microwave can ruin everything.
Agree that wifi isn't reliable, but not for that reason: microwave ovens haven't been an issue for wifi since most people switched to the 5GHz band, many years ago.
You would be surprised that most wifis out there still don't run on 5ghz. I mean what do you expect from non-technical people, wifi is just this white box that should work, if not turn off/on and then call support. Ie we (Switzerland) have both bands available from the router and till now even I didn't know that higher band is better for interference, and I am most technical in the family/friends circle.
5Ghz also has drawbacks. Routers support both, usually with an option to either combine them and handle the selection automagically or separate them. Parent is just wrong about routers having switched over completely - and thus the microwave can indeed still be a problem.
This is about local connection problems, audio device with your phone:
>Hello? … Wait, hello? Can you hear me? Okay, hold on. Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it. Okay, never mind, I’ll just hold it up to my head. Hi, ugh, sorry about that.
I can confirm this. However, there is another class of problems, too, which aren't mentioned. Network problems. It is the year 2022 and still in many areas reception is really lousy. I need to hang up and call people again constantly.
It is not really better with FaceTime Audio or any other VOIP tech. It completely sucks! I want to connect instantly and then have a stable connection for at least 30min with crystal clear audio. Am I asking too much for 2022??
I spend a lot of time outdoors hiking and biking. Since 2019, I have noticed a serious stagnation -- and possibly degradation -- of phone reception. Used to be, I could send a text and call someone on even 1 bar of EDGE. Now I basically need >2 bars of LTE to do anything -- less than that and my phone isn't usable.
Maybe I need to pick up a 5G device. I am still using an LTE phone from 2016, so there could be some bands I'm missing out on. But my partner's much more recent phone has even more issues.
On my first iPhone, I could get train information on my phone with a 1 bar EDGE connection in a few seconds. Totally impossible in 2022, you indeed need a relatively decent LTE connection. I suspect this has to do with increased congestion on the cell towers.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if this is happening to you it’s your fault. You must either live in a coal mine or use terrible tech for your calls. I have voip calls all the time and they’re all what you’re asking for. It just takes a tiny amount of forethought when deciding on what tech to use.
You mean it’s all fine when you sit in your office using fiber and expensive VoIP gear? But how about when you are on the move? The ‘coal mine’ starts 2 meters outside the center of London and that’s not only for data.
Yep, then too. The stats are extremely clear about this, don’t use cheap carriers and don’t use cheap Bluetooth. Southern England has excellent cell coverage.
I bought a SIM in Brazil a few years ago and was bombarded with text spam within minutes of putting the card into my phone, most of it from the carrier.
Can confirm. From Germany, have the same number for 15+ years, basically any provider has this number and probably leaked it at some time. Still no spam at all. I think there are heavy penalties for that in Germany.
In the Czech Republic I get like one spam call per year, and it’s usually semi-relevant (carrier, bank, insurance), virtually zero scams or blind marketing calls.
Same phone number for 17 years, dozens and dozens of companies have seen it.
I have never had any of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods w/ an iPhone and a MacBook since AirPods came out. My issue with phone calls is 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls
I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere. It's completely fixable, but American telcos make money off letting scammers operating boiler rooms in India steal money from your grandparents, so they're happy to utterly destroy any utility that a phone has.
It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know. The few times (like now, unfortunately) I expect a call from an unknown number related to follow-up for in-person business, when I answer 95% or more of incoming calls are scams/spam. This is with "Spam Block" enabled, that already blocks known scam/robocall numbers AND NoMoRobo, what slips through is still the majority spam/scams.
I can't even imagine walking around with a cellular phone in 2022 without any of these tools, it's probably a hellscape just like using the web in 2022 without uBlock Origin, NoScript, and PiHole.
We can do better, and the adtech industry + the telcos making money off straight up scammers has destroyed the very fabric of technology as used for social connection.
> It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know
I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. I tell people this whenever I give out my phone number.
Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you, if they want to reach out they can text or email, and I can't imagine many urgent situations where they can't text, can't forward the message through anyone in my contacts, and can't directly get the authorities to contact me.
The only exception is automated phone calls (e.g. call from a random number for an interview or to confirm 2FA where I can't do SMS), in which case I have to temporarily disable silencing calls. But systems where you get called once from a random number and can't call back are really awful for other reasons...
> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. [...] Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you
I teach an after-school coding class. Some weeks ago, the parents of two children didn't arrive at pickup. After 20 minutes, I called the parents using the phone number listed in my company's system. The parents confirmed they were running late due to extenuating circumstances and were now ten minutes away.
I think this was probably better than involving the authorities?
The authorities have no reason to be involved. It's 20 minutes, and children can take care of themselves.
At least 99.9% of my voicemails are a couple second long robocalls, but in the rare event of it being a genuine phone call, I get the google transcription of someone saying 'please call me back' on my watch and then I do so. Just because I'm willing to glance at notifications on my watch of incoming voicemails for an instant, doesn't mean I'm willing to talk to hundreds of robocallers per month. Its just too expensive.
Voice phone calls are dead, kid discussion would usually be handled via text or email. I don't really get phone calls about my kids. I believe the more corporate-type environments enjoy the written documentation provided by text/email as opposed to unrecorded undocumented phone call.
The era of always-on low-fi audio connections was very short. Just 30 years ago, parents certainly had no electronic tether and had a home phone number, maybe with an answering machine in later years. And now that technology is completely dead and unusable.
I am amused by this blanket assertion. It really depends on the age/type of people involved and the kinds of interactions they are involved in. I am 50 years old and work in both software consulting and run a tugboat company. I had to take over the tugboat company two years ago due to a death in the family. For 30 years prior to that, I was working almost exclusively in software. During the last couple of years before taking over the tugboat business, I had my phone set to do-not-disturb almost all of the time. In the tugboat business, that does not work at all.
For dealing with software people in purely technical matters, text/Slack/Teams is fine. I respect the needs of others who don't like real-time conversations. For doing business deals in software, I often end up having phone calls with decision makers.
For the tugboat industry, it is too fast paced and too much money is on the line in quick deals to screen phone calls.
My kid is in CA, I am selling a house in AZ, and my wife is buying a house in GA. Most of my friends are out of state. Voice has immense emotional bandwidth advantages over any form of text. It definitely helps everyone in the stress pool
maintain levity. I do prefer all business to be conducted through text formats (email preferred) though.
In the case in the GP, maybe a message would have worked too but I don't see the problem with calling.
That said, I get a lot of spam calls on my Fi phone but I simply don't answer if I don't recognize the number. Fi asks me if the number was spam and it's simple to give a brief scan of the transcript if there is one and tell it yes or no.
Presumably, had silenced call be the social default, the parents would have added your phone number into their contact list on the first day of school, sort of like how you have to add someone on a chat app to talk to them.
Parents do not, as a matter of course, have my cell phone number. It's fine for a few families to have it (because e.g. I had to call them), but if every parent in the program was able to message me at any time of day, I think I'd have a problem.
Now, there are other ways this could work. My company has a "director of client services"—let's call her "Anna"—and all parents have Anna's number. So I suppose I could have called Anna, and Anna could have called the parents, and then Anna could have called me back to relay what the parents said. It just would have taken longer.
Of course, Anna is occasionally sick / on vacation / otherwise unavailable, in which case there's a second person—let's call her "Vivian"—who I can reach out to in an emergency. We're an after-school program, so we're not set up to have a centralized office phone, but I guess parents could add Vivian to their contacts as well.
But I'm happy I was able to just call the parents.
If someone is looking after my child, I have their number. I block calls from unknown numbers adn and some prefixes, and silence calls from numbers not in my contacts. This is pretty normal I think (because of spam).
I've only once had the problem that someone from the school used their personal mobile to call me and didn't get through, but I was already calling to let them know I'd be late.
There's no reason for parents to be able to contact you socially unless you invite it, but surely you should contact them from a school/shared number?
I'm suggesting this not for the sake of others, but for your sake. Given that people will block unknown numbers, I would think using a known number makes your life easier.
It seems odd to me than an after-school program has no set way for parents to contact the program without going through a relay-style process. I agree that the solution shouldn't be "give out your personal phone number," but it also shouldn't be "rely on a person that's not at the program to relay calls to you."
Put another way, how would a parent contact the program in an emergency? They'd likely (as you illustrated) go through an intermediary that may or may not be there. That seems less than ideal, and certainly wouldn't be something that I'd be happy about if my child were in the program.
Y'know, that's a great point. I actually don't know how things look from the parent's side--I can tell you for sure they don't have my number, but "Anna"'s number must be a business phone, as I know parents always have a number they can call.
I wish that were the case for me. Most calls and most resulting voicemails I receive are from scammers.
It's frustrating because all we'd need is some way to trace calls back to source providers and then let us apply client-side filtering akin to UBlock Origin. Easy.
Android has the option to ring if the same number calls within 15 minutes. I find it handy at least (though my robocall level is really low compared to the tales told here).
I'm guessing the reason you waited 20 minutes is because you know a call isn't a casual form of communication these days. I think people would say the norm should be that after 10 minutes you text the parents. In most case you will get a response sooner and if the didn't pick up you wouldn't be left wondering if something went wrong or they just dont pick up unknown numbers.
That worked until my son was hit by a car, and my wife in her shock had no idea where her phone was. I’m still to this day guilty that I didn’t pick up the phone the first time it rang.
The truth is that this problem will kill the telephone system and honestly if this is how the telcos treat it, it deserves to die.
When I was in the ICU, the hospital went down my emergency contacts and failed to get a pickup until they dialed my dad. The people who were my emergency contacts were good at handling the process and simplifying things for my parents once they found out (shortly after my parents) but they felt some degree of guilt for having failed to have acted.
There are decisions to be made in these situations - notify work, transfer health information, ensure payment stuff is in order, notify people. It's much nicer to have someone handle all of these things.
And, in the end, I think people would have liked to have seen me before I died, should that have been my fate. And that takes flying out of wherever into wherever.
This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma?
>> What did you have to feel guilty about? You could have done something for your son, remotely, that wasn't already being done?
> This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma?
Some people have tenuous connections to humanity. In this case, a failure to understand anything surrounding a loved one's accident, other than the provision of physical care. I think that's somewhat more common with tech people, due to how some idealize aloof "rationality" to an extreme.
> There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you
I get a lot of calls from people for whom my first introduction/interaction is a phone call. I make a lot of money and otherwise get a lot of value from some of these interactions. Some are completely bogus telemarketer calls, of course, but I find that being reachable is still valuable. I have learned how to filter out the most obvious telemarketers. I hope that my competitors ignore unsolicited calls.
(This depends on industry and role within an organization. Certainly people who never have to interact with strangers can screen calls. But don't assume this is true for everyone.)
I get tons of spam calls and texts, but I really never see any of them anymore. I'm on Android and Googles distributed spam detection is really working great. I'll get a notice sometimes that I got a txt moved to spam but most of the time I never see these, and it seems to also block all robocalls too and they only go straight to voicemail.
I probably have 15 voicemails right now I never knew came through because they're junk and auto-blocked.
> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list.
My ringer is always silenced, I get notified to calls because I have notifications for calling enabled on my watch. I should consider disabling notifications altogether for calls not in my contact list.
My Pixel phone has largely solved this for me. The built-in Call Screening is stellar and I don’t get bothered by robocalls much anymore because of how well the phone handles these.
Likewise. Half the spammers hang up the moment I activate call screening, the other half (probably automated) keep talking and then I hit the spam button. All the (marginal) benefit of saying "take me off your spam list", far less trouble.
I get the same issues I did in the US here in Iceland, fwiw.
I get the added bonus of no longer being able to use many voice activated features because names aren't phonetically pronounced or simply have characters that aren't recognized by CarPlay.
"Call Þórunn mobile." "I don't have a Thorin." "Call Porun mobile" "I don't have a porun".
You can give contacts nicknames and Siri will recognise that instead of their main name.
So if you set Þórunn's nickname to be "thorin" Siri will be able to recognise it. Basically just go through your contacts and give them all nicknames that are English phonetic spellings of their real name.
I had to call my mom "Mamma" in every possible field for Siri to call her when I say "Hey Siri call mamma" (I'm Italian but my phone is in English).
Before that she was only "mamma" as first name but I had other "mamma zoe", "mamma ale", "mamma gio" and Siri always wanted to call "mamma zoe" when I said "Hey Siri call mamma".
After filling some fields of my mamma she started asking "Who would you like to call?" and started saying all mammas in my phone book, but when I said "mamma mamma" she started calling a random one or not getting it.
Now that I have my Mamma (first name) Mamma (middle name) Mamma (last name) of company Mamma nicknamed Mamma with email mamma@mamma it works... go figure!
Not that you should have to do this, but you can tell Siri (using your own voice) how to pronounce your contacts’ names. She’ll transcribe it into IPA or something.
> I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere.
Not trying to defend US or its telecoms here, but I think it has more to do with scammers trying to maximize for profit.
Just like with malware heavily targeting Windows instead of macOS/Linux, or some apps prioritizing iOS instead of Android (by either launching as iOS-only and then introducing an Android version later, or just not holding up the quality and polish of the iOS version on Android). It isn't because Windows is inherently more insecure, and not because Android is a worse platform. It is simply because it makes sense moneywise.
Why would a scammer focus on targeting low-disposable-income countries, if they, on average, can extract as much money from one US person as they would have to from 10-15 people in Phillipines. For scammers, it seems to be simply more profitable and efficient to target US residents.
Are you implying US is the only non-low-disposable-income country? lol. This isn't a problem in say, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, etc., as it is in the US.
Also, the most spammed country appears to be Brazil, and it is far from the top of the disposable income lists. Many among the most spammed countries don't register on the top disposable income lists.
There's something else at play here. Likely legislation/regulation.
Your spam info link is to Truecaller, which measures how much their users in each country get spam calls. That's definitely not a random sample of each country's users, so it's hard to say whether their conclusions are correct.
It all began moving to digital relatively early in the 60s, but even well into the 90s many systems were still functionally analog, with copper wire pairs carrying analog signals in a /not-metaphorical/ loop between callers.
Today we have comparatively infinitely greater capacity and capability, and there's no going back, but the "core experience" of the modern voice "app" is without a doubt a pale reflection of its original progenitor.