[HN Gopher] Analog Phones
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       Analog Phones
        
       Author : DanAtC
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2022-06-12 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (computer.rip)
 (TXT) w3m dump (computer.rip)
        
       | samcheng wrote:
       | It seems like "hard" IP phones are becoming obsolete at this
       | point. I definitely haven't included them in any new office I've
       | spun up in the past five years. WFH during the pandemic really
       | sealed the deal - it's not like everyone went around installing
       | new work phones at home. Video conferencing replaced conference
       | phone calls for almost every corporate use case.
       | 
       | Consumer business-wise, outbound phone use cases are easily (and
       | better!) handled with a software solution, and inbound phone use
       | cases can be handled with e.g. Twilio or something like Amazon
       | Connect. On the small business side, something like Grasshopper
       | works just fine.
        
       | madengr wrote:
        
       | D13Fd wrote:
       | This is a weird article that imagines that businesses skipped
       | straight from analog -> IP. They mostly didn't. Mid-size and
       | larger businesses had been running digital phones and PBX systems
       | for years and years prior to IP phones.
        
         | jcrawfordor wrote:
         | This was sort of a terminological failure on my part... When I
         | say analog I am including typical digital PABXs. Now that's
         | somewhat fair because a number of small and medium business
         | "digital" PABXs used digital signaling and analog audio,
         | especially key systems. But there were plenty of entirely
         | digital systems, and of course ISDN had decent popularity in
         | large institutional contexts. I'm not sure what a great term is
         | to encompass all of these systems besides "non-IP."
         | 
         | But on the small business end, most businesses are doing just
         | that right now... Going from one or two analog lines to a cloud
         | managed IP solution.
        
         | don-code wrote:
         | There's an awkward, intermediate step, sort of like what we had
         | with 1G cellular: while the signalling was all digital (but not
         | IP), the actual voice payload was carried on a dynamically-
         | provisioned analog channel.
         | 
         | We had Merlins at my parents' store when I was growing up, and
         | an interesting artifact of the analog channel was that some
         | analog data was possible. For instance, we hung a fax off one
         | of the Merlins (14.4k was fine); I likewise got get 33.6k off
         | it when I plugged in my modem, but could never get 56k. In
         | hindsight, that's because 56k actually requires the line to
         | support digital signalling, which the Merlin did not.
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-12 23:01 UTC)