Analog Phones

There's an awkward, intermediate step, sort of like what we had with 1G cellular: while the signalling was all digital (but not IP), the actual voice payload was carried on a dynamically-provisioned analog channel.

We had Merlins at my parents' store when I was growing up, and an interesting artifact of the analog channel was that some analog data was possible. For instance, we hung a fax off one of the Merlins (14.4k was fine); I likewise got get 33.6k off it when I plugged in my modem, but could never get 56k. In hindsight, that's because 56k actually requires the line to support digital signalling, which the Merlin did not.

This was sort of a terminological failure on my part... When I say analog I am including typical digital PABXs. Now that's somewhat fair because a number of small and medium business "digital" PABXs used digital signaling and analog audio, especially key systems. But there were plenty of entirely digital systems, and of course ISDN had decent popularity in large institutional contexts. I'm not sure what a great term is to encompass all of these systems besides "non-IP."

But on the small business end, most businesses are doing just that right now... Going from one or two analog lines to a cloud managed IP solution.

This is a huge shame. I wish I could use a hardware phone or at least a SIP client.

While there's technically no reason why a computer can't do just as well as a dedicated phone (after all, a phone is just a low-powered computer), in practice, modern computer-based communications software is terrible.

Protocols are all proprietary and are often centralized - there is no P2P, not even optionally. This is something Skype used to do brilliantly over a decade ago (on much slower hardware), preferring P2P if possible.

The clients themselves are absolute trash. Hardware phones still have CPU speeds measured in megahertz and are faster & more responsive than modern communications software on multi-core, multi-gigahertz CPUs and gigabytes of RAM. Teams is the worst offender here, but even Zoom is not that great. Again, this is a problem that was solved decades ago, I remember having perfect calls on TeamSpeak 2 back in the days on machines much slower than now and sub-megabit DSL connections, and yet it's no longer something I can take for granted nowadays. I can establish and answer a SIP call between 2 hardware phones faster than the Slack takes to load.

At least if they were using a standard (or at least documented) protocol I could write my own client, but since the objective is often "growth & engagement" that's not possible either because the annoyances of the official client are considered a feature by the original developer.