simfree

The new fad among wireless carriers here in the US is to route what they think are spam calls to a fake voicemail box.

Voicemail that is left in this generic voice mail box never makes it to their customer and the customer is completely unaware that some of their calls have been diverted.

Hyatt and their associates do this for me even on Hyatt's own WiFi. I guess Firefox and Chromium are banned user agents if your an Android or Linux user...

Peak requests per second (and whether a SIP invite or CGI script being run) would be very useful to know.

SIP hasn't gotten much heavier, nor CGI scripts, and tiny distros like OpenWRT can do a lot with little iron.

Heard lots of rough ADSL era VoIP stories, hopefully you weren't struggling with that back then.

"Google offered me a pittance to take over and then kill my extension" doesn't make for a good headline. They'd rather just nuke the malicious extension when they get notified of its sketchy behaviour.

If it's good enough for every cloud but Microsoft Azure, why pay to have your own bespoke virtualization platform with its own errata?

Firefox password sync just works. It's one of those things I never think about.

Watching friends and family struggle with bespoke, poorly integrated password managers makes me cringe and is one of the big reasons I enjoy the seamless experience of the built-in Firefox password manager.

Google certainly tortured me and everyone else I knew who had a Pixel 6 (or Pro) phone, you would randomly lose cellular and WiFi and they would not recover on their own, necessitating a reboot or toggling airplane mode to get back online.

The Exynos chipset is cursed, Samsung only ships it in markets where performance is a lower priority than price, hence not shipping Exynos in the US outside the Google Pixel whitelabel relationship.

Google's Pixel handsets have worse modem performance than similar flagship Samsungs sold in the US, as even Samsung won't sell their underperforming Exynos chipsets in their flagship phones in the USA.

Exynos 5G New Radio chipsets got really bad with the Pixel 6 series, where the phone randomly loses cell signal and WiFi at the same time in areas with strong signal, and the only way to get back online is to put the phone in airplane mode or reboot the phone, sometimes neither works though.

Canada is also a much smaller market that has minimal competition with unique cellular bands preventing reuse of said phones outside of a handful of other countries (without severe breakage of VoLTE, or missing low band coverage).

Verizon is really thin on the ground out West, their coverage just keeps shrinking as their LTEiRA partners shut down or get bought out by T-Mobile and AT&T.

Between Reno and Las Vegas it's pretty stark, huge holes in Verizon's coverage and a few 3G CDMA only towers, while AT&T has strong band 14 coverage, and T-Mobile has slightly better coverage than Verizon but also lets you roam onto AT&T.

Meanwhile in the San Juans the situation is dire on Verizon, with only one tower just on Orcas Island. AT&T has a handful of towerd, two on Orcas and then they force roam everyone onto T-Mobile who has dozens of local towers.

So long as you are on AT&T or T-Mobile with roaming you'll have the best coverage possible, but if your stuck on Verizon it seems your in for a rough ride these days.

Teams phone system is a significant additional licensing expense, it's definitely not free.

It's also not standards compliant, despite speaking a malformed version of SIP, so you can't just plug it into standard SIP Infrastructure and have it send and receive invites for calls, or send and receive SIP simple messages for texting.

Inband signaling for the win! Having the overhead of a separate control channel was more expensive than just doing the signaling in band.

Indian communities in the US can often be clanish, and self-segregate to specific areas of a neighborhood or town.

You can see this in action on the eastside of Lake Washington, always fun to get glared at for being at the wrong block in Samamish, or the wrong (or sometimes right) condo building in Bellevue. Do not bring a dog! You will get solid stares, does not matter how said dog behaves or what local policy is.

Seattle notably legislated against the caste system persisting in the city, but from what I hear it still is a thing stateside. Most of the Indian community lives outside Seattle though.

Paying money doesn't buy you a magical get out of Black Swan event free card.

These exact same politics can happen inside a company or organization that you pay money to. Economic pressures just add on to it as well, and if they go belly up, you don't even have the source code for any potential fork to rise up from.

Perhaps they are throttling this transfer to 1Gbps so as to not slam their network or disk I/O? It does seem quite slow.

Stripe and other payment processors make doing regular PAN data exports hard, so all the credit, debit, ACH and similar stored payment methods are trapped in their system and you are beholden to their whim.

Someone should come up with an automated payment data replication service to hassle Stripe into backing up your data to another merchant account regularly.

Oregon permitted direct enrollment onto Medicaid when you show up to the hospital and qualify for it, and they don't chase down and audit most of those enrolled thankfully.

By the way, if your still in the Greater Seattle Area you might check out the Connections Museum & Seattle Community Network, as both might be up your alley.

Yeah, kolinko really missed the whole "competitive APU" part of OP's comment. AMD has been pushing "The future is Fusion" and shipping CPU/GPU combined chips that fit in your normal CPU socket (or BGA soldered to a board) since 2011.

It did take from basically 2007 to 2011 to do the design and many dev runs through what is now Global Foundaries as the way GPUs are produced when manufactured into silicon by a foundry is fairly different than CPUs, so finding a working medium between those two processes took many failed attempts, pretty surprising they were able to do it in less than half a decade!

The government decided building their own cellular network was too expensive, so they paid AT&T to build FirstNet atop the existing network and gave AT&T band 14 spectrum to do that.

All users of both AT&T and FirstNet get access to a much larger pool of wireless bandwidth, resulting in faster speeds for everyone involved, and a much lower cost to build out a network dedicated to first responders. In the event of crisis, FirstNet will get priority on the band 14 spectrum.

Dish is not a viable provider todau and didn't exist in 2016 when FirstNet went out to bid.

Verizon is unwilling to densify their suburban and rural networks to meet the coverage requirements, so they passed on bidding for FirstNet.

T-Mobile felt FirstNet was too big a lift when they didn't have clarity on the 600Mhz spectrum auction (which wrapped up in 2017) nor the rural coverage and suburban density they have today.

https://www.designworldonline.com/firstnet-bids-are-in-now-t...

Telus, Bell and Rogers are ingrained in the minds of Canadians as the only options.

Almost all attempts to change that over the years have failed or have not been able to get sufficent market penetration to become self funding for rapid growth.

Canadian investment funds would rather go and buy U.S. ISPs from failing ventures like Frontier (creating Ziply Fiber) than investing in Canada because they know how bad the situation is. Getting sub-30% market penetration when offering, better, less expensive fiber internet makes the Canadian market uneconomical for deeper investment by insurgent ISPs.

The Canadian consumer is easily swayed by Bell/Telus/Rogers propoganda like https://web.archive.org/web/20140402040045/http://fairforcan...

Most of Google, AWS and ilks traffic is moved over settlement free peering and fixed cost infrastructure: https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/level-3-seals-...

Whether 100TB or 1500TB of data are delivered to one ISP at one peering point in a given month has minimal effect, that 10Gbps, 100Gbps or larger port is a fixed cost that will exist regardless of traffic.

The cost to serve the video file is much lower than what Google says it costs. Moving a terabyte of data is quite cheap to do, yet GCP, AWS and ilk continue to have eye-wateringly high data usage pricing.

Infobip truly is unhinged. Having interns post about why ChatGPT is bad, while also making the peerlessnetwork.io portal slow as a dog, and going off on anyone who makes the effort to API integrate with them.

Someday they might find a viable business model, but buying Peerless Networks, building slow, unreliable tools to interact with their infrastructure, and not owning up to the poor architectural decisions (under-resourced Python webservers) that led them there is bad business.

Backups exist on Signal Android.

Upstream speeds are increasing, Comcast is building out mid-split doing 100Mbps and 200Mbps up, and the other cable companies are doing network rebuilds for mid-split or high-split.

Fiber penetration is increasing every year, usually with symmetric speeds. Verizon FiOS is already fairly built out, CenturyLink/Lumen/Quantum is doing plenty of Infill, Ziply Fiber is part way through its 5 year plan to go from 28℅ fiber coverage to 85%, Frontier is actively building out fiber, etc

Wireless is only getting better too. Single Primary Cell Carrier Snapdragon x62 modems deliver up to 150Mbps uploads today, and newer Snapdragon modems can upload on multiple Cell Carriers at once (the secondary cellular frequencies they are connected to).

Ratios for upload fo download for asymmetric connections are trending towards below 10 to 1, rather than 20 or 30 to 1. The days of 1200Mbps downloads with pathetic 35Mbps upload are numbered.

How does it compare to app.lmnt.com ? lmnt sounds quite good to me, near natural.

Walmart, Amazon, and the other big companies are not interchange exempt. They are not able to get a significant discount below interchange, hence why they keep financing lawsuits against Visa, MasterCard and such over the bundling of all Visa or MasterCard branded low-cost (non-rewards) and high-cost rewards cards under one banner that they are forced to accept as a bundle.

Merchants would love to reject all cards that are a Visa Signature and above, leaving only the very low cost cards as accepted. The Card Networks have engineered via branding and contracts that this does not occur though.

Rather than relying on the idea that you're more sophisticated than everyone else who could steal from you, you could just leave your money with a mainstream financial institution that's regulated.

Many libraries are still on slow DSL connections that do not meet the current (or even the old 25Mbps/3Mbps) definition of broadband, and they have limited hours as well.

T-Mobile's Project 10 Million where they offer capped & throttled data service that is significantly worse than what their cheapest postpaid plan offers certainly isn't a reasonable broadband replacement either, it is clearly a pile of crap T-Mobile is forced to offer to meet the 10% educational usage requirement of their Educational Broadband Service (EBS, 2.5Ghz spectrum running LTE & 5G) licenses.

So what are the kids to do? Get bent, sucks to be poor! Seems to be the current answer our society has chosen.

There are a ton of sketchy browser plugins that form VPN relay networks.

I would be very surprised if they are not using a new, clean residential IP on a US ISP for each and every account.