I remember in the early nineties I found in my grandmother’s antique store one of those old black candlestick phones that you would jiggle to ring the operator. It didn’t have a rotary dial.
I plugged it in and got dial tone. I jiggled the hook and an operator answered the phone and asked me something. I don’t remember if I hung up or talked with them.
When mobile phones came out they improved the system significantly but it was still very much old tech.
Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.
Even just switching mobile voice standards is painful, as seen in Australia recently. In theory, you just need VoLTE support to use calling over 4G, but it turns out there is a bunch of other compatibility issues like emergency calling, device software and firmware settings, and carrier side problems that complicate matters.
It’s almost as if volte being a* proprietary technology hurts consumers and a lack of emergency test numbers (numbers that use the emergency system but are just for testing that it works) makes things harder.
Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.
But that’s probably not necessary. You could install something on your phone that does phone number lookup and then just dials the number as normal. The service doesn’t need to be built into the old phone networks this way.
Related: this is why the audio quality of phone calls is so bad. It’s using what’s basically a predecessor of mp3 compression at a very low bitrate. Originally because that’s what the bandwidth limits were like, but now just for the sake of backwards compatibility. That’s why making a VOIP call sounds so much better: it’s using modern audio codecs and a higher bitrate.
Because the phone system is old
It’s also backwards compatible to an extreme:
I remember in the early nineties I found in my grandmother’s antique store one of those old black candlestick phones that you would jiggle to ring the operator. It didn’t have a rotary dial.
I plugged it in and got dial tone. I jiggled the hook and an operator answered the phone and asked me something. I don’t remember if I hung up or talked with them.
When mobile phones came out they improved the system significantly but it was still very much old tech.
Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.
Even just switching mobile voice standards is painful, as seen in Australia recently. In theory, you just need VoLTE support to use calling over 4G, but it turns out there is a bunch of other compatibility issues like emergency calling, device software and firmware settings, and carrier side problems that complicate matters.
It’s almost as if volte being a* proprietary technology hurts consumers and a lack of emergency test numbers (numbers that use the emergency system but are just for testing that it works) makes things harder.
*potentially multiple technologies
But that’s probably not necessary. You could install something on your phone that does phone number lookup and then just dials the number as normal. The service doesn’t need to be built into the old phone networks this way.
Related: this is why the audio quality of phone calls is so bad. It’s using what’s basically a predecessor of mp3 compression at a very low bitrate. Originally because that’s what the bandwidth limits were like, but now just for the sake of backwards compatibility. That’s why making a VOIP call sounds so much better: it’s using modern audio codecs and a higher bitrate.