landlines are interesting anachronisms

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Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

i like how between consumer voip running over internet connections with no qos and highly compressed cellular phone codecs, making phone call in 2015 is worse quality than 1990

higher bitrate codecs ("HD voice") at least are becoming more prevalent but still lol

also the death of landlines leaves many with no form of communication in long periods of electricity being down. the lovely battery backup units on fiber/cable voip lines last 8 hours at best

# ¿ Oct 5, 2015 04:55

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:06

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

they have some backup, but chances are your cell phone is gonna die before the tower dies

your average consumer isn't gonna be a sperg and conserve battery life on their phone, and gone are the days of Nokia candybars that'll last days between charges

# ¿ Oct 5, 2015 05:11

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

the first time I had an hd call to someone else on t-mobile it was absolutely amazing. I can barely understand what someone is saying with the overcompressed garbage and then boom, perfect clarity. now I just facetime audio for everyone because gently caress ATM cells and the network they rode in

cell phone audio is poo poo because everyone still uses super high compression codecs are like 6 kbps compressed, not because of ATM

# ¿ Oct 6, 2015 05:03

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

but yeah t-mobile hd audio + iphone noise cancelling is like night and day

# ¿ Oct 6, 2015 05:05

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode

thx fishmech

# ¿ Oct 6, 2015 06:40

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Shaggar posted:

are they using voip or something or does tmobile's cell network/iphone actually have support for g722 (or other hd codec)

the latter

# ¿ Oct 6, 2015 22:17

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

I don't care mash my idiot voice in to an IP stream with no qos and hope for the best because as lovely as that is its still better than the "conventional" way of 100% consistent overcompressed garbage carried over atm

good luck trying to maintain a voip phone call moving between cell phone towers over a data channel

actual phone calls are handled in a special way so the call doesn't break

and there's no atm in the more modern poo poo

# ¿ Oct 6, 2015 22:18

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

goddamnedtwisto posted:

atm is still used a lot in the back end because telcos never throw out anything and there's still a shitload of pbx systems out there that don't talk anything more modern

also there's no reason at all why you couldn't keep a persistent data connection at handover on (most) 3g and lte implementations (or even hopping between them), but making that work absolutely consistently is hard and it's easier to make customers handle it themselves, particularly as it breaks their pricing model if they let users use their own voip

this is only going to get worse once they start selling volte as a premium product even though it's actually cheaper per-minute for them

i don't know what the gently caress you're talking about but

a) there's no atm in any lte networks
b) the difference in how calls are handled vs data is a technological difference at (depending on the technology) the physical radio/air interface level

# ¿ Oct 7, 2015 14:24

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

goddamnedtwisto posted:

atm is still used a lot in inter-carrier links and on the backbone of fixed-line telcos because of lovely old kit that was amortised over thirty years and so is going to get loving well used for thirty years. i wasn't claiming it was used in lte, but even then i'd be surprised if it weren't still lurking on the inter-carrier links of lte networks for the same reason.

ok

atm is terrible dont get me wrong, i was just perplexed at the fixation/bitterness about it

did atm touch you guys in a bad way a long time ago :v:

quote:

as to the difference between voice and data, yes i'm aware of that, but the ability to hand over data calls seamlessly has existed almost as long as cellular networks and every cellular data standard currently in use has it. the reason it doesn't happen on some (most) networks is they've absolutely no incentive to get it to work because about the only use-case for it is voip calling and mobile carriers are still stuck in a 1920s billing structure that insists voice gets billed in minutes.

the nokia 9500 from 2004 had the capability to keep up a persistent ip connection on handover between wifi, 3g, and gprs (although you needed a nokia box to terminate the far end of the connection) and even (if the network used nokia radios and switches) to automatically and seamlessly route voice over that connection and fall back to the cellular voice network as required - because all of the carriers had only just upgraded though (and really didn't want to rejig their billing to keep those precious minutes up) the capability died on the vine.

volte is getting traction because it slices a shitload of overhead off voip-over-cell and, probably more importantly to the carriers, is designed to work with their pricing structures. i'm willing to bet a substantial sum that even when volte is standard worldwide you still won't be able to do seamless data handover though.

nope

before lte your voice call is handled completely differently by every layer in a mobile network, all the way down to the physical air interface

even in the UMTS/WCDMA world, voice channels are given different CDMA orthogonal codes compared to data channels. the ones voice gets are able to deal with less ideal radio situations better than data (cell edge/low signal conditions, etc) to make sure your call has a better chance of surviving, especially during mobility

because lte gets ride of the concept of handling voice differently than data on the air interface, it changes the way it must be handled. thats why volte has taken many years after lte has rolled out in the us to be adopted. it complicated to handle a bunch of different poo poo (transferring a call between LTE and 3G/2G being a big one). in fact, verizon's current volte can't hand back to 3G/1x without breaking the call, but i guess verizon feels their lte network is ubiquitous enough that this is an acceptable compromise

volte traffic is prioritized at the base station level to make sure the call can be ensured to be reliable over the air interface. policy all the way back to the core network (which is all ip) makes sure this reliability is maintained, because maintaining a phone call over air interfaces is complex. it has nothing to do with pricing

yes with a modern reliable lte connection if you stand still you can probably do an OTT voip call over the connection because it's low latency and high bandwidth enough, but put yourself in a situation where you're moving at high speed or dealing with congestion because a particular tower has a shitload of users on it at a given moment, and expecting to maintain a reliable call without interruption isn't gonna happen

you can't have reliable voice communication over the radio interface without the networking doing some heavy lifting for you

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 05:20

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Nintendo Kid posted:

my grandma's phone line, which is now provided over fios, is still billed as a party line (and thus at a discount) because the house was hooked up to a party line back int he mid 60s when she moved into the house. Everyone else sharing the line/number got seperate regular lines by the 1970s.

that's a fun byproduct of the regulation of phone service, verizon can't make changes to your rate/service without your permission and you can keep the same poo poo forever

with my mom it wasn't beneficial, i caught "inside wiring maintaince" for $4.99/month or something tacked on her bill since 1989

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 05:20

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

goddamnedtwisto posted:

i didn't deny that at all. my point was that it's been possible to do this for a very long time but none of the networks have bothered to properly implement it because (and let's be charitable to them) it's hard to do right, expensive, and has no particular use case that benefits them. the main innovations in volte aren't technical as such but instead in getting buy-in from carriers and handset manufacturers.

no they arent

carriers need a voice solution for their lte networks, that isn't an optional thing they can just choose or not choose to do. eventually 3G networks will be sunsetted (but who knows when)

they all just have robust 3G/2G networks that they could let handle voice until the technical issues with doing volte were solved. there's more to volte than handset vendors and infrastructure vendors agreeing on what voip client to bake into a chipset

and i still don't get what you're saying "has been possible but carriers just haven't done it"

your data connection is persistent on a mobile connection in terms of your IP address etc but the qualities of a mobile connection dealing with radio conditions make it unsuitable for attempting real time communication like voip

this has nothing to do with carriers, it's the fundamental design of the technology

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 14:46

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Nintendo Kid posted:

i'm glad that america never got stuck in dsl hell

although in places with more dense housing dsl can be lot better if the carrier does it right

and unfortunately in tyool 2015 at least comcast is still oversubscribed garbage around here

at least for two friends of mine that have their internet slow and/or randomly disconnect during evening peak usage hours

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 14:53

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

fart simpson posted:

this is some serious nerd poo poo

it was all off the top of my head too

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 14:55

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Nintendo Kid posted:

last year, when i was living down in a college town, we moved into an apartment building that was 1750 feet from the Verizon central office, by line distance. nice and close right? i mean by the standard calculations that should be full speed dsl distance. so did they do it right? well

the maximum speed available over DSL was 1 megabit / 384 kilobit, and most of the time it performed 768 kilobit / 256 kilobit.

3 days after moving in, i had the verizon service the tenants that were already there had been using canceled, and switched to 105/10 comcast which consistently overdeliverd

the hell of it is, the DSL service was $40 because they were paying for one of the top tiers. the comcast was $65 including cable tv.

i mean if the telco isn't garbage like verizon

50-100 mbps over dsl exists in some parts of the world

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 17:16

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Alereon posted:

actually sms is part of our push to move carriers off of ss7 to pure IP networks. instead of a billion ss7 links, establish one or a small number of gige/10gige links and use it for signalling, transport, and all related connectivity. often sms was the first IP link they established, so if we got them to do more than a lovely vpn over their office isp it was a good foothold.

ss7 chat yessssss :flashfap:

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 17:18

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Alereon posted:

the java admin gui from tekelec (now oracle hahahaha) is straight out of a 1990s hacker movie, i feel like im staring at a nuclear reactor scada console. sadly i cant find screenshots on the internet.

a few years ago i got to walk into a lab that had to have a bunch of ss7 equipment running for testing/maintenance for some really large carriers

it was like entering a time machine, magnetic tape and massive cubes everywhere

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 20:00

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Malcolm XML posted:

docsis 3.1 makes gigabit easy so theres little point to FTTH

1 gbps shared among potentially 3-500 homes is still poo poo and the uplink speed is still garbage

unless cablecos want to push fiber close enough to the subscriber so it's almost fttc, it's still gonna suffer under heavy load during peak usage times

GPON shares 2.4 gbps with 32 users max

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 00:54

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

The_Franz posted:

at&t has uverse which is fttn and vdsl for the last bit, but it's still garbage or unavailable if you are too far from one of the ugly, refrigerator sized yard boxes that they had to put everywhere. they're basically screwed since their highest speed tier is slower than the 'standard' tier on cable and it's going to get worse as docsis standards keep advancing. vdsl2 won't help much since the "up to 100mbps" speeds start dropping off quickly after just 0.5km and the upload is still trash. they're gonna have to start rolling out ftth or they have no hope of competing.

uverse is garbage for a multitude of reasons, but yeah the loop lengths are too long to get decent speeds and then you're throwing potentially multiple iptv streams on top of that so you've got little left for internet access

at&t is doing more ftth but they could have done their fttn poo poo in a less garbage way but they cheaped out

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 01:32

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Malcolm XML posted:

i thought they already pushed fiber to the CMTS and since coax >>>> twisted pair docsis >>> fttc vdsl2

if i run a 1 or 10 gbps fiber to a vdsl2 node and then do vdsl2 to each individual subscriber, in all likelihood there will never be enough contention on the fiber link and i can reasonably give each vdsl subscribe full speeds under peak usage times. the limiting factor is the quality and length of the twisted pair loop but if you can keep that short enough, a dedicated 50-100 mbps per household is achievable

the cmts is waaaaaay further upstream than a fttc node, and you have hundreds of users sharing a single broadcast domain on the coax plant at the fiber node

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 02:02

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

computer parts posted:

fortunately no one cares about uplink unless they already have access to fiber

lol if you don't exclusively or very often get to work from home

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 03:39

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Nintendo Kid posted:

it was my understanding that one part of why analog cable was ended in most of the country was that the cable cos didn't want to bother putting analog signal generation stuff in the nodes closer to homes, as they replaced more of their network with fiber

nah, it was just to free up capacity for more TV channels

1 analog channel eats up 6 MHz, which you can shove many SD or a couple HD digital channels onto depending on how lovely they feel like making the compression

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 03:40

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Malcolm XML posted:

sure but bursting up to 1gbps+ and then only getting 50mbps steady is probably better than 50-100 steady since that'll take care of most downloads

also what about fiber to the cable node/distribution point rather than CMTS? that's basically fttc with coax on the subscriber loop

except you wont get 50 mbps steady with 3-500 users sharing a few hundred mbps capacity if the node is fully loaded during peak usage times

none of my friends with comcast around here get their full internet speeds consistently in the evenings

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 03:42

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Nintendo Kid posted:

Well yeah that's the other part. More digital channels and more room for internet service

Idk where you keep getting hundreds of users on a node that sounds v 90s/early 2000s, or they've been putting fuckin 10 gigabit plus lines to the nodes

In the past 10 years of cable service, at 5 distinct locations and two different carriers I've never had dat oversubscribed slowdown any time of day.

Started out with 15 megabit cable when we switched back from dsl in early 2015, went up to 30,then 50,then 105,then 150.

i dont know what you're talking about in terms of "10 gigabit plus" lines because it's simply RF over glass, it's not a 10 gigabit or even 1 gigabit data connection to the nodes

from the CMTS downward its purely DOCSIS

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 03:56

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Nintendo Kid posted:

If there isn't even a gigabit connection getting to the node, then how are the hundreds of people happily using their now standard 50-150 megabit connections at peak times. The math doesn't work in your scenario, but this stuff has been working fine in reality.

im not suggesting every node is oversubscribed, and of course docsis 3.0 has made things better

but fundamentally you have the potential for contention and oversubscription because there is significantly less capacity in a cable system on a per subscriber basis than with fiber

but ive witnessed multiple instances of oversubscribed nodes where i live with friends that have comcast

back when i was in college i lived next to campus where im sure everyone had a cable modem and it was unusable trash that regularly disconnected and my speeds were always poo poo. when i called timewarner the tech i got escalated to noticed the node was at capacity and had nothing else he could do

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 04:05

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Malcolm XML posted:

lmao digital redlining

boston and baltimore will never get fios because verizon determined it wasnt profitable enough, so you essentially have digital ghettos where cable internet is the only game in town, a lot of the us is like that

public utility commissions with some backbones prevent cherry picking by mandating if they wire some areas under their jurisdiction, they have to wire all of them, which is the case in places like philly and nyc

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 20:12

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

lol if you think american cablecos consistently deliver anything close to 150 mbps to subscribers at reasonable rates uniformly across the markets they operate in

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 20:26

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

required reading before you comment on the state of telecom in the us

http://www.amazon.com/Captive-Audie...aptive+audience

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 20:28

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Nintendo Kid posted:

you specifically called out boston though.

ever since switching to 150 mbps comcast, the fcc says i've been getting 170 mbps sustained download speed through my connection...

boston is an example of digital redlining by verizon, it effectively cedes 100% of broadband service to a single company because dsl is too slow in 2015 for anyone to accept so there's no competitive check on comcast's pricing

i would imagine comcast will invest more in infrastructure in a big city like boston than say the random suburbs of any mid size southern or midwestern city it has markets in so yes, you getting decent speeds doesnt surprise me

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 20:39

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

computer parts posted:

actually, surveys show that cable companies serve at or above the rate that customers are billed at essentially all the time; the people that are below average tend to be DSL

you might have issue with the tiers that they bill, but that's got nothing to do with the actual connection

dsl is poo poo as well, no argument there as most implementations are neglected and ancient equipment and technology running on ancient twisted pair lines

cable service definitely varies wildly in both quality (stability) and throughput. just because its better than a lot of dsl doesnt make it not poo poo when you compare it to service you can get in other parts of the world

id agree its "less lovely" if your only other choice is 1.5 mbps frontier/centurylink adsl

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 20:42

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Nintendo Kid posted:

hey moron, there's two seperate cable companies in boston: RCN and Comcast

also i got decent speeds in loving appalachia on comcast as well in a college town where the compettion was literalyl like 1 megabit dsl

and i got them in suburban new jersey outside of philadelphia

have you considered that your knowledge is outdated as gently caress maybe

come on fishmech...we were having such a nice chat without name calling up until this point

in the dc area i have experienced within the past 3 months:

1) switched my mom back to fios after her being on comcast for a year in order to get "new" subscriber pricing from verizon since they wanted to charge her $90/month for 50 mbps internet. her 25 mbps comcast service regularly would dip below 15 mbps and even with her basic netflix/email needs she notice a negative difference coming from fios.

2) my friend who lives in a large apartment block in the suburbs has his comcast service regularly disconnect multiple times a week and regularly gets less than 10 mbps

3) my previous company had a comcast "business class" cable internet connection that regularly alarmed it monitoring systems because it constantly went down

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 20:48

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

echinopsis posted:

this guy is living a communications dream

# ¿ Oct 11, 2015 16:36

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

feeling really sorry for all those traumatized by dealing with pbxes itt

stay strong brothers

# ¿ Oct 15, 2015 00:18

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

I do wonder if their quietly gaming the testing destinations for the samknowns boxes by giving the traffic a QoS bump

the potential choke point is further down the chain, so it would take some serious creativeness to do that

but you never know with loving comcast

# ¿ Oct 15, 2015 00:19

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

phone system started gettin' squirrely today. checked and realized it's been about three months since the voice switches were restarted. there's a bug that causes issues after they've been on for like 100 days or something like that.

maybe it's been fixed in the latest firmware revision. too bad management is literally too cheap to pay for a support contract with a vendor so we can get it. guess i'll just restart 'em again. this time i'll leave myself a reminder to restart them in advance. hopefully i'm not around by then.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2015 00:43

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

fishmech posted:

post more landline poo poo

wheres nintendo kid

# ¿ Nov 16, 2015 20:20

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Shaggar posted:

phones are crap and landlines are dumb.

im sorry fairpoint has abused you for living in a lovely state :glomp:

# ¿ Nov 16, 2015 20:20

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

goddamnedtwisto posted:

short answer - british telecom payphones had no other way of bypassing the coin-request apart from calling the operator - freephone calls were actually just reverse-charge calls to a fixed number at a discounted rate

the longer answer is basically that but also throwing in the advanced state of decrepitude of large parts of the old gpo network meaning that quite a lot of large companies outside of london were unable to run their own automatic pbx so these were actually station-to-station calls to an operator at the destination who would then connect to an available agent - the discount on the freephone system was cheaper for bt to give than to actually fix this.

there was also a rumour that bt were deeply suspicious of automatic freephone systems because they were the entry point for an awful lot of phreaking activities in the us when they were introduced there - certainly this would match with the software (possibly too grand a word as most of them were still electro-mechanical) in payphones that locked out dialling of any number not beginning 1 or 9 without cash going into them, and the local exchanges that similarly would only allow 1- or 9-prefixed numbers nowhere but the local operator.

lol this owns

# ¿ Nov 23, 2015 15:15

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Alereon posted:

ss7 supremacy, diameter can suck it

awwww yeeeeah

# ¿ Nov 27, 2015 15:58

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

fishmech posted:

well you might as well just say the whole number at this point, being 478 area code and a 45x exchange means it would be somewhere in Macon, GA if it really was an active number.

what CLLI is that exchange hosted in wikipedia brown :fishmech:

youre slipping man

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 03:14

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:06

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

LastInLine posted:

fishmech is unironically the best

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 03:20

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > landlines are interesting anachronisms

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