[HN Gopher] An industry based on missed calls helped bring India...
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An industry based on missed calls helped bring India online
Author : lifeisstillgood
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-04-10 12:07 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (restofworld.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (restofworld.org)
| walrus01 wrote:
| I would encourage any North American or European interested in
| this sort of thing to go buy a $45 Android phone from aliexpress
| (or two or three different models, if you're really interested)
| to see first hand what the very low end of the mobile data
| smartphone market looks like these days.
|
| There are some things out there based on reference mediatek
| chipset designs that are _remarkably not terrible_ relative to
| their price. Create a new fake named gmail /google account on
| one, install some apps from the play store, mess around with it.
|
| randomly chosen example:
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001470142781.html?spm=a2...
|
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001586490693.html?spm=a2...
| baybal2 wrote:
| The problem is cellphone sellers on Aliexpress frequently are
| simple scams.
|
| I.e. you buy something from a seemingly not complete scam
| seller with few hundred of reviews, you get your tracking
| number, but nothing actually arrives despite tracking showing
| somebody in your country claiming the package.
| gumby wrote:
| Pre mobile phones (but post caller I'd) my wife and I called each
| other several times a day just to say mushy things to each other.
| It was ok to ignore the call but an immediate second call meant
| "actually I need to speak with you". I'm sure others must have
| invented the same system.
|
| But I love ZipDial's idea to take it to another level.
|
| The European idea to make _receiving_ GSM calls free was
| brilliant. The US's idea that "the person with the radio pays the
| extra fee" held back mobile adoption in the US by a decade.
| colorboy wrote:
| Clogged 30% of national operators capacity without giving a penny
| That's hell of a deal
| phoe-krk wrote:
| I remember the same being the case in Poland years ago. "Sending
| an arrow" was a cheap way of communicating with other people, and
| it was a savoir-vivre violation to answer a phone that rung for
| less than five seconds because it could charge someone for a full
| minute of voice connection even if it was only meant to be an
| "arrow".
| aj7 wrote:
| My family used a 1-bit missed call signaling system in Brooklyn
| in the 1950's. Both -one and -two ring missed calls indicated
| prearranged messages, generally "arrived safely" or "leaving
| now." Back then, poorer families had party telephone lines, too.
| drfuchs wrote:
| In my experience even many decades ago in the US, the "ring" that
| the caller hears in their handset before the recipient picks up
| is not actually from the "bell" of the recipient's handset;
| rather, I understand, it is generated at the caller's local
| switching station. And there's no system-wide synchronization of
| these ring signals. So, if the recipient hears N actual rings,
| the caller may have heard N-1, N, or N+1. Does anybody who used
| these signaling schemes have experiences where the wrong message
| (or none at all) got communicated?
| inetknght wrote:
| That's been my experience too. It "works" for local calls but
| it completely breaks down across a nation.
| toast0 wrote:
| It can be generated more or less anywhere along the path. I
| don't think it was typically generated at the caller's local
| switching station, because often there's some delay before it
| starts, and I didn't think that level of information was
| communicated. However, sometimes you would get some ringing and
| before a final signal tone (busy, fast busy, call cannot be
| completed as dialed, etc).
|
| The phone system has almost always been a heterogeneous
| distributed system with lots of different capabilities though,
| so lots of possibilities.
|
| I have a hard time listening to podcasts or audiobooks, but I
| like to try to listen to Evan Doorbell's Telephone Tapes, a
| bunch of old (mostly 1970s) recordings of the phone system with
| recent commentary from the person who made most of the
| recordings. http://www.evan-doorbell.com/production/group1.htm
| unishark wrote:
| In the US, I recall the ringing sound for the caller being
| different depending on who you were calling. I understood it to
| be generate by the remote station, powering their ringer via
| the line. Presumably you could still get different ring counts
| in such a setup if one side hasn't been connected to the call
| yet.
| jakub_g wrote:
| It's 2021 and I'm in Europe, and I still use missed calls for
| calling my family abroad. Typically goes like this:
|
| - I call them on Whatsapp, but their Android phone is sleeping so
| they don't receive the call notif on Whatsapp
|
| - I send a missed call via GSM to wake their phone
|
| - They call back on Whatsapp
|
| International calls are still expensive even within EU, while
| huge data packages are included in even cheap monthly subs. I
| can't comprehend the GSM operators' logic.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| > I call them on Whatsapp, but their Android phone is sleeping
| so they don't receive the call notif on Whatsapp
|
| Is Android really that terrible?
| zwayhowder wrote:
| No, I receive Whatsapp call notifications when the phone is
| off. But it's also a setting that can be disabled. The
| scenario described doesn't remotely match the user experience
| I have with Whatsapp calls.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| iOS is the same. My husband has an iPhone and I frequently
| find he doesn't receive WhatsApps notifications in good time.
| So for urgent messages I now SMS him. And if I send him
| photos etc I SMS him to check his WhatsApp. Perhaps it's more
| something to do with WhatsApp's infrastructure than
| iOS/Android?
| maven29 wrote:
| Most Android phones let you turn off mobile data and Wi-Fi
| while the screen is off. Something similar might be at play,
| since FCM is pretty reliable, even with the most brutal doze
| parameters and additional power optimization measures imposed
| by manufacturers.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| https://dontkillmyapp.com
|
| Pretty much, and I say this as an Android user. The OEMs brag
| about "long battery life!" but they're fucking up by
| hibernating apps in the background.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Interesting how things turned around on their head.
|
| Until recently, one thing I hated in smartphones was task
| management. There was no way to kill an app and _keep it
| dead_ , no way to manage what processes are running on the
| phone at any given moment. There were third-party task
| managers that sorta, kinda sometimes worked, but the phone
| fought you hard.
|
| I'm kind of sympathetic to the phone vendors here - the app
| ecosystem is a mess, every app vendor feels _way_ too
| entitled to their users ' resources.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Not consistently - _most_ of the time it works, but it still
| happens often enough.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| WhatsApp is. My wife has the same issue on her iPhone.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| We even had a term for this: 'beacon': the phones were
| expensive,the tariffs even more so and most kids had very low
| call credit most of the time. So if you have almost no credit
| left, you call someone, hang up quickly and they suppose to call
| you back.
| ljf wrote:
| We called it a 'drop call' in the UK in the early 2000s (or at
| least my friends did).
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I bring this up because I remember arranging similar things with
| my parents as a child. The walk home from school was moderately
| long for a kid (4 ish miles) and if it was raining it was
| uttterly miserable. So I could shelter in the railway station and
| call home for a lift - but I rarely had the money and hell it was
| two bags of crisps for a single call. So two missed calls in a
| row while it was raining was signal to my mum "come get me at the
| station!"
|
| I think I am saying that I am old enough that I span generational
| shifts in wealth.
| toast0 wrote:
| We did collect calls...
|
| Would you like to accept a collect call from senior lot? Meant
| please pick me up from the senior lot. At some point, collect
| calling became possible for third parties, and they let the
| caller hear the other party answer so you knew you got the
| information to them.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| Remember the TV ads regarding telephone calls and collect
| calls?
|
| "You have a collect call from ... 'we-had-a-baby-it's-a-boy'
| ... do you accept the charges?"
|
| "No." [Hangs up]
|
| "Who was it?"
|
| "Jimmy and Susan. They had a baby. It's a boy."
|
| [Buy our better value telephone service!]
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Actually, it was warning about not cheating the phone
| company, and saving money by buying Geico instead.
| markdown wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V04bh-G4-qU
| [deleted]
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Same here. Three rings meant I was home safe when riding bike 6
| miles from nans or to nans. Now all my nieces and nephews have
| iPhones.
|
| Happy for them but something has been lost in independence.
| bengale wrote:
| I'd completely forgotten this but I remember always keeping a
| small amount of credit on my phone so I could 'dead ring' home
| and I'd get a call back.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| My father had a car phone (that is, for those that may not
| know, one of the early mobile phones you had to have installed
| in your car).
|
| We also had caller ID at home. We knew if he called us at home
| and hung up before we answered he was just calling to let us
| know he was stuck in traffic and would be late for dinner.
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(page generated 2021-04-10 23:01 UTC)