Hacker News Reader

Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

My family and I go to a cafe for breakfast most saturday mornings.

The one place we usually go to has no phone signal at all anywhere in the ~150 seat restuarant. Its part of the reason I like going there.

We turned up last weekend to see they had put new QR code menus on all the tables. I had no intention of using them so I ordered from the counter as I usually do, knowing they wouldnt even work because of the lack of phone signal.

I spent over an hour that day silently chuckling as I watched pretty much every single customer pick up the QR code menu and try to use it. I saw a few get really annoyed and end up leaving. Im not sure how much damage the place did to their clientel in a single day, but I went back yesterday and they had all been removed.

You couldnt make it up!

View on HN

Please tell them. They probably got a huckster in there who sold them the QR code madness by promising them increased sales.

Slight tangent: I've noticed that robot waiters seem to never actually be doing their jobs, and the presence of one in the store is the sign of the restaurant being poorly managed.

The idea that there could be hucksters selling these door to door to bad managers explains so so much.

Small businesses often get sold tech things that don't make sense. VOIP is one I see frequently. There's nothing quite like a small business with a 2Mb/s upload, several Dropbox/OneDrive clients, and a VOIP contract.

Why does VoIP not make sense for a small business? From my experience working at small businesses it looks like VoIP and the features it enables is a huge gain. Call waiting queue, voicemail to email/website, automatic hours/go straight to voicemail, holding/transferring calls, multiple lines with only one phone number, etc.

I'm talking <15 employee businesses.

It's the 2Mb/s upload in my example that's the catch. That'll often be asymmetric at a 10:1 download:upload ration (or worse), so it's almost impossible to do any kind of traffic management to make it work well.

I'm talking about places that can't get an internet connection that can support the VOIP systems they're sold.

I hear you with the 2Mb/s upload, but that isn't a problem for VoIP in and of itself. What makes 2Mb/s upload an issue with VoIP is not having a good router (i.e. one with CAKE queuing support or something similar) and then getting hammered with buffer bloat making your latencies go to 1000+ ms because someone's iPhone decided to back something up (don't know why it never seems to be an issue with Androids).

^ The above is precisely my experience and is a large part of why my workplace hasn't moved to VoIP yet, despite needing the features.

2 Mbps is tight but can definitely support 0.1 Mb/s calls. The vendor needs to ensure the phones tag audio packets with EF priority and the router uses a strict priority queue. (Whenever a voice packet arrives it pauses handling non-voice traffic until the voice queue is clear. This ensures a voice packet is never delayed by more than 1500B / 2 Mbps = 6 ms).

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quali...

How do you even get a 2Mb/s connection in 2024?

Upload? Everywhere in the US. 100Mb/s Down, 5Mb/s Up, but the up really gets 2-3.

Even Comcast is doing 50Mbps/15Mbps with overprovisioning giving you an extra 10% or so.

AT&T, CenturyLink and other telecoms have ceased making ADSL and often VDSL2 readily orderable, and jacked up the rates on legacy customers to push them off old, slow connections on their aging DSLAMs.

Move to Canada and pay premium prices.

Easy: Be in Australia

The median is 8mbps in Australia, not 2mbps[0].

0. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/australia

aah, so you've never been out of the cities.

I have, and even then 2mbps is not a normal speed. Fixed wireless services in rural areas are beating this tenfold:

https://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbn/documents/how-we-ar...

Are you trolling, misinformed, or do you have access to some data I can't find?

I travelled about 13,000km around the country less than a year ago. At very few points in that trip did I have 2mbps, let alone more than that, not even in some of the fancy places.

I definitely had better than that in Perth, and Kalgoorlie, and I had surprisingly good speed in Ceduna - maybe even 10mbps. It was pretty good in the Barossa, too - it's fine if you happen to be near a city.

But the places with good internet represent perhaps 1% of the area I covered.

Where in this self-reporting and not-at-all-independent pdf that you've linked to does it talk about what percentage of rural customers are on this fixed wireless service you speak of?

Seems to me they're saying that 92% of fixed wireless users are above 25mbps, but I don't see anywhere where it says what percentage of rural users have that service, as opposed to e.g terrible long-haul adsl connections getting a couple hundred K if they're lucky.

If they're saying that 92% of users are over 25mbps, and you believe it, then my response is a simple chortle. Maybe 92% of fixed wireless have it, but if that's the case then about 5% of people in the outback are on fixed wireless, it would seem.

A couple of places I visited told me "oh, no, there's no phone or internet at the moment, hasn't been for a couple of days"... like it wasn't at all unusual or unexpected.

Yeah, QR codes should come at a minimum with a WiFi password written on them exactly because of this. Even better would be not to even bother with all of that but it's easy for owners to fall for grifters selling "the future" to them.

All examples that I have seen require the download of a PDF.

If the restaurant isn't smart enough to compose an HTML menu which is very friendly with mobile devices, then they should not be using QR codes.

This.

If you're forcing me to look at your menu on my tiny screen, optimise for that. Do !not! optimize for fricking print when you're not going to give me the printed version! Grrrrrmbl.

My favourite are the ones that straight up give you the print-prepped PDF: CYMK color space, bleed, crop marks, test patterns and a whopping 12 MB for a single page.

sounds like a good case for preserving opt-outs anytime you try something new.

Wait until someone encodes an entire menu in the QR code.

With the (ATM) highest version of QR codes and the minimal error correction, you're limited to 4,296 bytes(0).

And V40 is not something I've seen(1) in the wild :)

0: https://www.qrcode.com/en/about/version.html 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qr-code-ver-40.svg

Reply on news.ycombinator.com