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Comment by bitkarma | Hacker News Reader

I quickly went from "what a fun weekend project" to "where on Earth would I find two landlines to test with?"

The article didn’t even use them. They hacked a single voip ata with two ports and connected those together. That’s a pretty elegant (albeit impractical) solution to that rather unique problem.

Internet over phone over internet :D

I quickly went from "what a fun weekend project" to "where on Earth would I find two landlines to test with?"

Ask one of the 151,287,292 people in the United States who have a landline.

Aren't most ISPs worldwide phone service providers? I get a landline forcibly packaged with my internet service. I don't even have a landline phone.

They are usually VoIP phone providers, they are just running a phone connection over the data you already paid for.

Modems and fax machines are pretty sensitive, and pushing that sound over a packet switched network with UDP instead of a circuit switched network leaves a lot to be desired.

So there are some places that still support old copper lines, but in many places, if they have to run a new line, they'll run a coax or fiber to your house and give you a plug in off of that.

It's basically not an offering in many places now.

It may be different now, but I remember back in the early 00's being unable to get better than a 14.4 connection over voip... That's all the provider would guarantee and was intended for fax use.

just need a Landline-as-a-service :)

It already exists and is called a VOIP provider! You won't get very high bandwidth but you can generally get 9600 baud or so.

This came up every few months when I was at Twilio (2012-2014) - primarily regarding supporting faxes. From what I remember from the folks who knew SIP really well, the issue was mainly that there's too much variability in terms of latency and the modulation/demodulation of the analog signals that modems use.

100% of the companies that I installed LG IPECS systems into back in the day also became e-fax customers.

By the time you've got a dedicated channel for the fax machine (missing an inbound PO delivered via fax because the sales team is hitting the phones hard doesn't fly anywhere) and are paying an additional monthly fee for another DID the cost is usually a wash anyways.

It's money exceptionally well spent to not have to worry about G.729 jitter and the nightmare that is analog>digital>analog>digital and back.

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