Kids Love Landline Phones
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rnz.co.nz
I also like that landlines can't be used to hijack your brainstem to the same degree that smartphones can. My friend's five year old gets to call her grandpa and grandma whenever she wants but can't get pulled into some YouTube Kids nonsense just because the screen was handy.
On that subject: My 75 y/o mother-in-law frequently starts calls to my wife's wireless phone saying "Oh, good-- you're home..."
Rarely are we actually home when she calls.
It's interesting to see her long-held assumptions about phones demonstrated.
Fwiw they feel the same way about digital cameras and ipods - touchscreens are "simple" but nothing beats a single-purpose tool for playing around with.
Yesterday, I was trying to talk to someone whose iPhone is dying. Three disconnects. Hearing myself echoed back after about a second. Too much background noise. Gave up and sent email.
(I miss the days of ISDN voice. 56Kb/s end to end. Full duplex. Rigidly synchronized at the bit level; no packet jitter. That's the best phone calls ever got.)
We must own the same lawn and have the same troubles with the neighborhood kids. It's almost like making a circuit out of a few 7400-series ICs, versus writing a 2GB electron app to increment integers on a 16-core machine... but guess which is easier and more widely used.
Also 90% of the time the callers on the landline want my wife and not me, but I'm the one working from home. "Calling the apartment" doesn't make sense for everyone.
I don't really see _any_ benefit since they switched this over to mandatory transparent VoIP. A dedicated ISDN line as a backup was good, I agree.
When I was a kid, I liked to play with the old rotary phone in the shop, and I always wanted to goof around with mom's old typewriter. There's something about these very tactile old devices that appeals to kids (and adults)
Talked to them for three hours :-)
That said, we have probably (collectively) given up reliability and quality to various degrees for in-our-pocket (mostly) always-there ubiquity.
But more than that, when he's a little older, how would he call anyone to get help? When a phone is locked, you can call 911, but it's not really obvious how. A landline would be a nice big target.
That said, our house, despite being a century old, doesn't have a single phone jack. I've been thinking about running an ethernet line for a VoIP phone, but they are pretty "buisness-y" and not the nicest to look at. Does anyone have a recommendation for a simple to use/nice to look at VoIP phone?
EDIT: Looks like there are adapters that take ethernet in (and I could split the PoE for power too) and go out to a phone cord. I would probably want to terminate it to a wall plate, but then I could just buy any old phone I liked.
When my oldest was 6 and started walking home from school by herself, we got a cheap push-button landline phone and an cheap no-name box where you would plug power and a SIM card into one end and the phone cord into the other end.
Taped a piece of paper with our phone numbers to the phone mount, and she would call us almost every day when she got home just because she could. And she still remembers our phone numbers by heart, 7 years later.
Something like https://en.avm.de/products/phone/ (I think they're intended to be paired with the same company's router/modem though). Most of the usual VoIP hardware companies have some DECT phones in their lineup that don't look too different from the analog ones.
If you're put off by the design of phones that try to make joining meetings easier, maybe look for the more basic models, like Poly (now HP) VVX 250?
(I haven't used either model personally)
I bought a Grandstream HandyTone 801 as a bridge. I use voip.ms as a service provider. Both are geared toward more technical users, but the service is very reasonable for the price. Instructions for configuring it are clunky but not too bad: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Grandstream_HandyTone_802_-_HT8....
I had previously tried Ooma, but I didn't like that it wanted to sit between my router and modem.
Rather than specific hours, I would probably just create an allowlist of friend and family numbers and trust them not to abuse it.
I've never used that device so I can't say how good it is, but something like that would let you use any analog phone.
IT doesn't have to be that way. Ideally we'd stream the data (whether compressed or uncompressed) directly to the other end. There are standards for this but, well you know how standards are: so many to choose from.
In hindsight I think lossy compression of telephony was a mistake. It's 64 kbps for classic narrowband. GSM and other early digital cellular technologies could provide perhaps 5 - 10 kbps per handset and voice just had to be crammed into that. It made sense in the early 90s in that one application. It makes little sense in other applications, either then or now.
The long distance network of the late 70s into the early 00s was mostly uncompressed digital PCM, while the local loop was analog. The result was a basically distortion-free channel from about 200 to 3 kHz. Oh, and it was mostly synchronous too, so the delay was generally under 100 ms even cross-continent. You used to be able to immediately interrupt the person while talking just as in an real-life conversation. Some telephony systems running over packet-switching with buffering end up with such significant delays in practice that you have to take turns like it's a walkie-talkie.
Luckily, at least on my phone, when I attach a bluetooth headset, I can still get full duplex audio through the headset
I'm from Iowa, a state where that made lots of money, globally, for decades.
I think it’s basically true.
If I call with Signal or Skype or something, usually the audio is pretty clear, and doesn't seem to crappy to me. Even "regular" phone service on my iPhone seems to be pretty clear to me.
You could argue that it's "too" clear I suppose, but I don't really think it's a bad thing personally.
(I've recently switched to using my headphones over audio jack again, and the problem persists, so it's not the Bluetooth headset profile - though in general, when HSP kicks in, the audio quality goes to the gutter.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Rate
> The quality of the coded speech is quite poor by modern standards
> The codec is still widely used in networks around the world.
we got "HD" sound, but latency is still there for phones we got energy efficiency for LED, but it's blasting us with blue light (i got some chicken light bulbs lol) we got keep warm and scheduled cooking for rice cookers, but it's tainted with PFAS coating and still don't taste as good as kamado-san
makes me wonder what other inventions that beat the old in every possible way.. silicone chips i guess?
Hell, you can still rig a physical handset to work with bluetooth + cellphone and it'll guaranteed sound terrible.
EDIT: phrasing, wording.
As someone who had to make sure that call audio was properly processed on a phone I worked on to make it match today's standards, I can say without hesitation: it's all three.
The codec you get can vary from okay to terrible; the way mobile phones are built these days requires you to do echo cancellation; and the environment phones are used in requires you to do noise reduction.
Just disable audio processing on your phone, feed the network with raw microphone input and notice the complaints from your interlocutors. I've been there :)
Something's gone badly wrong in your memory; landline phones intentionally drop important vocal frequencies and automatically prevent everyone from sounding like themselves. Cell phones don't do that and have always had much, much, much better audio than landlines.
I experience these problems even even both of the participants are at home using WiFi calling.
I have been lamenting this problem for ages.
I think his goal was to build a toy for his kids in the process. Or maybe just a toy for himself.
I have a century+ old house and want a candlestick phone in my foyer for the effect. Asterisk is super fun. I've been looking into what it would take to candlestick (NLP->) <-> Asterisk <-> some cell phone as my "home" number. The hard part for me is that the candlestick needs to "talk to an operator." [Edit: no dialing]
Plus Grandpa can call them anytime.
I've never actually used a rotary phone that was actually in service. I think I know how to dial with it, and I've played with one briefly at a GoodWill about 17 years ago. They definitely have a very satisfying "chunkiness" to them, as most clockwork gadgets tend to. I wouldn't mind picking one up but I have to fight against my hoarding tendencies, and I don't have any kids to which I can justify making them a toy.
All the “high tech” of a digital phone with the “fun” of having to wait for the digits to pulse out! Also I figured out at a young age that pulse dial was just toggling the rocker switch so I got pretty good at dialing by tapping the switch myself.
I saw a Cathode Ray Dude video that talked about this recently. I definitely would have enjoyed playing with this and annoying my parents if I had known that that was how it worked.
The coolest thing IMO watching kids use an old-school home phone is how quickly they pick up new social skills/etiquette, especially compared to something more distraction-prone like Facetime. Also: the first time they try to plan their own playdate is infallibly hilarious.
Every Thanksgiving holiday they insist on calling people from it.
No.
No they are not.
Period.
It's a vanishingly tiny group of "kids" and in this case it's because they aren't allowed a smartphone... Ok, sure, any port in a storm but it's not like it was a choice.
I'm not interested in debating when kids should get a smartphone but replace "landline phones" with "discord servers" and it's the same thing. Kids don't care about landline phones (sure it might be interesting initially), they care about talking with their friends. If they only method to do that was via cans and string they would be using that, not because they want to or it's better/best but because it's all they have available to them.