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Comment by istillwritecode | Hacker News Reader

My wife keeps a land line because of superior voice quality for calls to her family. I find it handy because I can give a number to businesses when they demand one. We never answer that phone (it has been silenced from ringing). AT&T has no broadband service in my area - they offer only DSL and I live in a fairly rich area of silicon valley. The problem is that my utilities were put underground when the house was built in the 70s, so it's too expensive to upgrade the utilities.

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POTS would have had the same voice quality as a decent VOIP provider, as upstream from your home they were converting it to ulaw anyways. This would have been better than the early GSM codecs. But these days with VoLTE "HD Voice" uses a superior codec. Most chat apps will use a codec that's better than ulaw as well. So there's a lot of places to go that offer significantly better voice quality these days.

> give a number to businesses

> never answer that phone

Yes. A long time ago had to give a landline number to school, to have a discussion with them 6 months later on why they expected us to ever pick it.

We only ever used that line for international phone calls, and after cancelling it it basically made no difference in our life, except the savings. We give our mobile numbers when asked for landline, bullshit numbers to spam companies, block the ones that still get a real number, and ask relatives to call us on any other reliable service (international call quality was garbage anyway)

Dumb question, but it's the same in France and Switzerland, and year the fiber optic coverage is quite good. They just use the existing conduit. Fiber creates no interference and usually they run alongside telephone cables

The issue is that a lot of countries didn't install their telephone cables in conduits, but put them directly into the dirt. Adding fiber to it requires digging up the entire run, which is of course quite expensive.

Facetime audio has super high quality. It's noticeable. If you use voip you can get "hd audio". If they turn it off... have her try that! Not trying to argue, just offering a solution.

“superior voice quality”

Superior to what? With VoLTE the only calls I make these days that sound bad are people on POTS lines.

If you need to give out a number that you'll never pick up, why not just use any random non-working number?

it's often useful to have that line dump to a voicemail in the off chance that someone important did happen to call.

it's also useful to own the line you claim to own in the off chance of a verification of some sort.

One thing which is absolutely infuriating is the noise cancellation of iPhones.

For me, with multiple people, it frequently aggressively mutes the microphone in noisy environments such that they're speaking and it's entirely silent on my end. You can't turn this off, there's no setting. I can't speak to my parents if they're outside and it's windy or if they're in the car, or often if they're just on speakerphone inside. It's ridiculous.

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