A landline phone service seems a bit anachronistic, but there is a place for it. The future of telephony is here, but it sucks. Many here on HN probably don't even remember this, but phone calls actually used to be intelligible. Before cell phones and VOIP, before packet-switching and aggressive digital compression, calls traveled over Ma Bell's glorious circuit-switched network. You could actually understand what people on a conference call were saying, instead of every other word dropping into the digital aether.
Worse yet, you could talk at the same time as the other person! Carrying on a conversation with my mom is like talking at that fancy riot mike from a few years ago [0]. If you don't have a perfectly negotiated rhythm, you're gonna talk over the other person, cutting them off, missing part of their sentence, and then begin a flood of repeat/acks before starting again. It's bloody idiotic, and my mom is convinced she's just terrible at talking to people, when instead for the first time in her life the phone is too dumb to do the job right; she thinks she's terrible with tech, and it's really just dumb machines failing her expectations.
And never mind the loss of fidelity so you can't tell someone's tone or not.
Almost makes me wanna just chuck this miracle slab of supercomputing glass. plonk
[0] Seems like it's called the Delayed Auditory Feedback effect. Some researchers built a directional mike/megaphone combo that basically stupefies anyone it's pointed at into silence.
I agree that latency causes people to cut each other off. But I've not found fidelity to be a problem. FaceTime, Skype and WeChat voice fidelity beats POTS for me.
This is crazy, because I'm pretty much too young to remember a time when phones ever sounded good. The reason I prefer text to call isn't because I don't like to talk to people - I've just always found call quality to be utterly trash. Maybe this is part of the reason the younger generations prefer texting.
Obviously, if you want the most vinyl sound around, vinyl is the only way to get that. However, if you want maximum fidelity to the original audio source, vinyl has inherent limitations later formats do not.
True, but those limitations made it so, you had to have a decent mixing engineer do the mixing job. Nowadays, many CDs (which are supposed to be non-compressed) are actually crap mixed.
True, a lot of my friend have vinyl now. It's fun to listen to, generally more social. You can make a thing out of listening to vinyl much more easily than you can by playing music off your laptop speakers.
I'm more than olde enough to remember, but, actually, I've found call quality to be substantially better since all-digital was the norm, with the exception being when one endpoint or the other is doing something weird. What I remember from the days you are romanticizing is a palpable reduction in quality for long-distance calls, with even local calls having, often, worse quality than most calls do now.
Nope. We still have old-school landline here (they won't be terminated for a few years yet). I just did a test, and the difference is huge. Landline 1 - Smartphone 0.
Also the landline works even when the power line shut down, because it has it's own seperate power network.
You could also have a conversation in real time, and not delayed by a second. Cell phone delay has made it impossible for me to carry on a meaningful conversation with anyone.
There's also value in having a phone number for a house or a family, separate from phone numbers of individual people. I don't want my utility company or my cable company having my cell number. But I'm not the only person that can make decisions about anything we might need to talk to them about anyway. The house number reaches both my wife and me. Cell #s can't do that.
A google voice number that gets forwarded to both your cell phones? I'm pretty sure that can be set up. Not trying to be snarky, I do see your point, especially for a business where you want an office number that isn't somebody's cell phone.
This is why I keep a voip line as a home phone, with voicemails being forwarded to both myself and the wife. Very few select people get our actual cell numbers. All businesses, etc just get the home line number.
Exactly! We've got kids and our local school district likes to send robo-calls to remind people of events. Also the dentists and doctors are calling the day before with a reminder and that's automated for 2 out of 3 (dentist and doctor yes, orthodontist (ouch), no).
My wife and I both have cell phones that support T-mobile's HD Voice and its incredible how good our calls sound now. At work, the PBX system I deployed uses plain jane G7.11 ulaw and it sounds good, as good as the old system because ulaw is designed to replicate POTS quality. We also have the option to use G7.22 wideband, but I just never bothered (this wouldnt work on the POTS system so we'd transcode back to ulaw anyway for non-internal calls).
I have the opposite experience than you it seems. I grew up with POTS phone service and it certainly sounded fine, but towards the end everyone had cordless phones that universally sounded terrible. If anything, sound quality is pretty good nowadays on average. Of course, overly compressed audio will never sound good, but bandwidth costs being what they are, there's no excuse to be using anything worse sounding than ulaw.
Lastly, have you used a POTS line or a non-voip PBX lately? I find them to be noisy and scratchy. I'm so used to clean audio that when I have to use a (mostly) analog/PRI transport it really does sound terrible to me. All that background static noise is just distracting now that I'm not used to it. The same way I really can't listen to records or tape players or tolerate SDTV. I suspect there's an element of nostalgia here with the old POTS system.
It's a shame that a lot of this innovation, while radically increasing flexibility and dropping cost, has degraded call quality.
On the other hand, calls between certain compatible LTE handsets (AT&T calls this "HD Audio" in my market) sound far better than classic landlines ever did. Ditto for good Skype calls and Facetime Audio.
Not really. VoLTE is Voice over LTE[1], which most likely implements HD voice (wideband audio[2],) however, with carrier and device support HD voice could be done over 3G and 2G networks as well.
VoLTE is great -- I use it on Verizon. But at least with Verizon it is turned off by default and most people don't seem to turn it on. It is turned off by default because LTE coverage is not as complete as the legacy 3G coverage (yet).
Facebook audio as others have pointed out is great.
There are good quality codecs available that use less bandwidth and have better quality than traditional phone calls, but they are encumbered by patents and license fees. Most people just care about getting a service cheaply/free rather than the actual quality, so most providers will just use the G711 (what landline phones use for trunking) or GSM codecs which are free to use. G722.2 (AMR-WB or "HD Audio") provides a better quality at less than half the bandwidth of G711, but it isn't free to use so very few providers support it.
Not only that, but the codec needs to be supported at all stages of the call (the phones, the VOIP server, the trunk if external, etc), and if not it'll need to be re-encoded, which uses more CPU and reduces the call quality. As such you are probably better off just sticking with a more common, lower quality, codec. It's a chicken and the egg problem as providers won't support more codecs until hardware does and vice-versa (Twilio's SIP trunking service only supports G711, which is kind of the lowest-of-the-low).
It's amazing to remember how crystal clear phone calls used to be. I wonder if there's a niche for the first service willing to use more bytes and sacrifice efficiency in the name of analog-era call quality.
What you are calling "analog-era call quality" was likely mostly digital call quality, with only the local loop being analog. Before digital carrier facilities and switches like 4ESS, 5ESS, etc. became ubiquitous on the PSTN, there was plenty of analog noise on local and long distance calls, as well as delays, echo, crosstalk, and other artifacts. I remember a marked improvement in voice call quality throughout the 1980's. I believe wireless voice quality will increase organically as the bandwidth available for wireless digital services grows.
But telephony has always been band-limited to 3 kHz, even in the 'good old days' of analog lines. Voice quality over a transatlantic link compounded that with delays, static and fading. If you needed high quality audio over the phone system, it _was_ possible to book a 'music line' for things like outside broadcasts that did not have the aggressive filtering, though.
T-Mobile is what I have. I think they were the first?
But it sounds great on T-Mobile. I usually just talk to the wife both of us on iPhones and T-Mobile. And then I get the occasional call from someone else and I am like "What the !@# get a decent connection/phone/whatever!"
Frankly I doubt it. With Facebook, Skype, whatsapp etc all offering free, high quality calling, it's more likely for it to fade away than be replaced by a higher quality product.
Also anyone over 60 or so (super generalization) wants a landline. For evidence I give you my mother, my in-laws, and several parents of friends. Said friends, like me, would switch their parents to Google Fiber in a hot minute with or without their consent. So a landline offering makes sense, as without it, there's a sticking point. This helps make it more frictionless.
> Also anyone over 60 or so (super generalization) wants a landline.
It is a super generalization, as you say, but I question the accuracy. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't know that you're right. For opposing anecdata, I present my parents who recently gave up their landline while in their 70s. Granted, Mom was debugging IBM 370 core dumps before you were (likely) born, but there ya go. What I have not done is survey their friends and neighbors, or if they're are an anomaly.
However, one thing that might push even the elderly to getting rid of the landline is phone spam. It's the reason my parents gave me. Granted, cell phones aren't immune, but they are more protected.
Me, 60 isn't that far off, but we gave up our land line years ago. But I'm also commenting on HN. :-)
I think it's more of a network effect. That phone number has been given out for years, and all their friends and family have it. They'd have to get a second cell phone or use a service like Google Voice to make use of it beyond a landline, so it's logistically easier to just keep it as a landline number.
I think most people in their 60's will be long gone before they have a chance to buy cheap gigabit fiber with phone service (whether from Google or another provider).
IANAL but I do ISP compliance paperwork ~14 days out of the year...
Seems like Google could trip over the CPNI rules if they were using call data for AI training etc. Certainly if it somehow ended up used "for advertising purposes".
It's not so much FCC licensed as FCC reporting (Form 499, etc), though many states require some form of carrier licensing. In any case, Google's already had to jump through those hoops for Project Fi. E.g. if you search `"Google North America Inc." public` you should see a ton of filings about that.
SMB/Enterprise would be a interesting market for Google. That's a relatively high-touch market and I suspect they'd run into the same objections as Google's public cloud offerings with regards to support and hand-holding. POTS replacement (or even end-user cell service) is fairly low-touch & automatable by comparison.
All fixed VoIP providers must offer E911. I don't think they would have the option of not providing it. I don't know the exact rules, but I've worked for several small ISPs that offered white labelled Voice products and we always had to carefully maintain our address directories for E911 service, and customers were not allowed to opt out. (For example if the only address we had on file for a customer was a PO box, we had to get a street address in order to sell them the VoIP product.)
The sad thing is it isn't circuit switched networks or analog transmission that makes for call quality. There is no technical reason a cell phone can't have good audio quality. They just don't, because garbage-quality audio hardware and extreme lossy compression save a marginal amount of money.
I wonder why they can't fix the caller id problem? Why is it so easy for telemarketers to use fake information? I've basically moved to a telephone whitelist -- if you aren't in my contacts list, you are going straight to voicemail.
"I wonder why they can't fix the caller id problem?"
SMTP is much newer than the phone system. We haven't solved the problem of fake emails, because there's no way to get every mail domain and server to fully support DMARC and SPF.
Now, imagine the same problem, but with a load of old analogue equipment. That's why there's no clear path to secure caller ID.
Do you remember the long distance charges as well? We all owe MCI and their microwave towers - without that pressure Ma Bell would still being excusing their insane pricing with "Its this or pneumatic tubes."
I remember. I don't remember the quality difference being as stark as you suggest, but maybe it was. This offering from Google is VoIP as well though, right? I think a decent VoIP call's quality is still better than the average cell phone call, but that's not why I'd want this - I just find it convenient occasionally (maybe occasionally enough to justify $10/mo) to have a phone hanging on the wall. Something the babysitter can use reliably, for example.
I can easily experience this today by calling over wifi+Whatsapp instead of making a regular call. You'd think that the network specialized to telephones would have superior quality, but I've never experienced that.
You still can. My grandma phone, whith the dialing wheel and twisted wire, still works in France. And the sound is much, much better than on my 4G smartphone.
I remember getting my first cell phone back in the late 90s and hating it for anything other than texts. I used to do conference calling, long conversations on the phone with friends and family but the cell phone ruined it with asynchronous communication. A few years later I was in Bangkok and called my parents with the phone I brought from the US, crystal clear, latency free, it was amazing, it literally was the best cell phone call I had ever had to this day. I don't have an iphone but iphone calls seem to be pretty good so maybe I just need to get over myself and get an iphone for the quality?
This is complete tin-foil-hat territory, but I am going to say it anyway.
I used to travel internationally a fair bit to rural areas of SE Asia...
Places without wifi and cell.
I did feel different. I have no way to prove it was anything but placebo/mind -- but I did notice it.
Would be wonderful to see a study on this, even if to prove me a loon... but per your comment; I dont mind having a fully wired setup as opposed to all wireless - I'd love to see if there is any validity to this feeling.
Or the hacker's solution to maintaining a landline: get yourself a cheap SIP-capable handset and an account with a wholesale SIP-trunking provider like Flowroute ($1.25/mo for the number, $.0098/min outbound to CONUS, $.012/min inbound).
Proxy through OpenVBX or Asterisk (can be hosted in the cloud or in your home) if you want to get fancy with voicemail, IVR menus, forwarding, extensions for different rooms in the house, etc.
ISP bundled phone services are essentially just packaging this for you with 10x markup. (I worked on VoIP installs for a summer when I was 14; it's not that hard).
Only downside is most of these phones anticipate PoE, so you need to buy the power supply (or a PoE injector) separately. You also have to trust yourself to set up E911 correctly, or keep your cell phone around for that.
There's one more factor which is the configuration of QoS. This can be as easy as checking a box in a GUI for home routers. I've also spent days configuring Cisco switches, OpenBSD queues, VLANs, etc to achieve this.
>Asterisk (can be hosted in the cloud or in your home)
There's a FreePBX image that installs right on the Rasperry Pi, which some people just glue or tape to the back of their voip phone and plug right into one of the phone's ethernet ports. Clever solution for the price conscious voip customer. Toss in a $100 Yealink or Grandstream with a big color screen and off you go.
But won't that fail at the same time your home internet access fails - when the ISP link goes down? I have a land line as a redundant link, for security.
An actual POTS circuit provides redundancy, but many people's landlines aren't actually POTS anymore, they're the ISP's proprietary version of this with an ATA inside the cable modem. This should have the same failure profile, while being cheaper and more fun.
Telco/ISP provided "VOIP" is often technically Voice over IP (as in the protocol), but regulations and implementation can be subtly different from VOIP (what people think of as Voice over the Internet AKA "over the top" or OTT).
ISP-provided Voice often comes with requirements for battery backup in the fiber/dsl/ata box so the user can call 911 during a power outage. There's also reporting requirements for outages that prevent a user from dialing 911.
Also, with ISP-Voice the VOIP part is considered a implementation detail so it can be given absolute QoS priority over internet traffic on a given last-mile link. This helps with being able to call 911 while someone leaves bittorrent open or whatever. OTT voip doesn't get that benefit (and that's not technically a net-neutrality violation).
I like this idea, but I no longer trust Google to shepherd their side projects in the long term. Google voice had amazing promise (and I still use it) but it has also been a completely stagnant, without significant updates for a few years now. It conflicts with Hangouts, Google Fi, and the Android SMS app. Contacts are a mess. Ditto Google Groups.
Agreed on Google Voice, I used it all the way back to the Grand Central days and I wish it were maintained more. That being said, the Hangouts integration isn't that bad now. I know it feels risky to hit that 'merge to hangouts' button but I've been using it for a while without any huge inconveniences. The only problem I run in to is when I need to search for old SMS messages, the only way to do it after merging is by doing an 'in:chats searchterm' search in Gmail. That wouldn't even be so bad except that I also use Inbox and the search doesn't work in Inbox.
In theory I actually like the idea of having my SMS / Phone calls / emails / hangouts merged pretty tightly, but there are a lot of subtle ways that they could really screw up the user experience while making that happen so I'm still nervous about it.
I'm much happier having them carry Google Voice on in Hangouts than kill it. It is an incredibly valuable way to just have a phone number that works without having to pay every month for it.
it is on hangouts for years. and it suck in all and every way imaginable. if there was a way to make it suck, they did it.
you have to keep switching accounts (close conversation, press hamburger icon, click account icon) everytime! got a SMS? switch to the confusing SMS account. Got a SMS on your google voice account? switch to the account (gets better if you have two!).
Dial via google voice? had your SMS account selected last? you will only get a "can't dial" error and the app closes.
it is the worst wtf fest of all google screw-ups in usability ever.
> is by doing an 'in:chats searchterm' search in Gmail. That wouldn't even be so bad except that I also use Inbox and the search doesn't work in Inbox.
is there a way to access gmail once you've switched to inbox? I would love to be able to edit my filters again...
Thank you. Obviously that's easy to do- but I never would have thought to look there! Now I can go home and look like a genius to my wife by stealing credit from you.
What was really horrible and downright ATROCIOUS was the Messenger (SMS) integration into Hangouts. I was jumping for joy when they freed SMS from Hangouts again recently.
I'm not sure what you mean by freed SMS from Hangouts - once the two are merged you send and receive SMS in the Hangouts interface, as far as I know that hasn't changed. (That's how I do it today.) It's pretty simple, there's a dropdown menu next to the message input box that lets you select between Hangouts or SMS (if you have a phone number attached to that contact.) Works the same on mobile or in the browser. I remember there was some confusion around that when they initially added it but for the past few months it's been pretty straightforward and reliable.
EDIT: I see now, I think my experience is different from others in that I only use my Google Voice number for everything. Doing SMS to/from your actual phone number inside of hangouts is definitely a disaster. If that were my use case I'd be using the Messenger app. If you're exclusively using your Google Voice number, though, the integration is pretty straightforward.
Messenger has been in the Play Store for at least a year or two now, and you could always designate it as your SMS app. It was only recently that they started nudging users to switch to it from Hangouts (which is funny considering that they nudged everyone to use Hangouts for SMS not that long ago).
Sort of weird that it's something they bothered with, considering home phones are on the out and out.
Edit: That said, I'm sure there are still 100m Americans with phone service, but I don't know that the demographics of people who care to switch to google fiber and need phones are really that overlapping. Then again, Google probably researched this much more than I did. Just seems odd from my perspective.
Man, this site skews young! I just saw a smartwatch-related thread a couple of days ago, with half the comments indicating that no one wears a wristwatch. Today, no one has a home phone.
Forward-looking trends are what they are... but the overwhelming majority of the population is over 30. And that's the demographic with the overwhelming majority of income. Telephony is a pretty easy bolt-on for Google Fiber, especially since they already have the Google Voice infrastructure in place. So why wouldn't they?
It's not weird at all. A simple $10 a month home phone line can make or break the deal when trying to get a potential residential customer to switch to Google Fiber from an incumbent carrier. Also consider the number of younger people trying to get faster internet at their parents home so they can work/Netflix when they come visit, etc. This is a very smart play.
I still have a home phone, but it's an ObiTalk box that logs into my Google Voice account, so I don't pay anything for it. I actually prefer it over my cell phone because the call quality is much better.
This is the "sort of" landline solution that I use. I get iffy cell reception in my home, this means is a nice affordable way to ensure calls get through.
I think there's still a market for landlines although $10/month sounds like a high price point for such a feature. Having a stationary phone is important when you start having kids and they are old enough to know how to use it. There's a gap of several years from when kids are old enough to know how to call others versus old enough to warrant having their own mobile device.
So what happens in the scenario when the kid(s) is/are home with one parent or the babysitter and the adult falls down the steps and is unconscious? Certainly a 4-5 year can learn to call 911 for help and with a landline, hopefully the phone is a static location and always available rather than having to search through the house to find mommy or daddy's dead iPhone.
> $10/month sounds like a high price point for such a feature.
As someone who is forced by my monopoly ISP (with collusion from my local gvmnt) to buy bundled basic phone service for an extra $30/month (if I want internet access, which I do, and for which I have to pay $87/month for 30/5), I say people in Google Fiber areas don't know how lucky they are.
I feel products like this - http://www.vtechphones.com/products/product_detail/1673 - (just an example) are a better solution to this problem. You dont need a land line subscription, just a cell phone with bluetooth.
When my parents get home, their cell phones pair to the home phone, so when they receive a call, the home phone rings. They don't have to carry around cell phones, and they can place calls through their cell phones using the handsets. Seems complicated at first, but saved headache and $$ in the end.
I think the major selling point is that you're not SOL if you need to be reached or call 911 while your cell is dead/left in the car/etc.
Not that it's an important enough point for me personally to have a land line, but I can understand why a lot of people would favor that. As a $10/month add-on for existing Fiber customers it's not a bad deal.
>Get calls on your mobile phone. Stay connected no matter where you are. Have Fiber Phone ring
your landline when you're home or your mobile when you're onthe-go.
What? This is literally all about landlines. A minor feature is that you can redirect the landline service to your mobile phone, which is a feature that has been included in most landline services since mobile existed.
I recall reading almost three years ago about a pair of Google engineers who won a prize in the FTC's Robocall Challenge, but at the time weren't pursuing it further. I wonder if that is what's powering Fiber Phone's spam filtering?
I have a free Ooma landline, which isn't tied to a specific ISP, but if someone can truly crack the problem of call spam, I could definitely see that being a valuable service many would be willing to switch and pay for.
I wonder if this means they'll be actually working on improving Google Voice again after all these years, since it looks very much like this product bundles it. (The "ring your mobile" and "transcribe your voicemail" features.)
Anecdata: my Internet drops out for about fifteen seconds three or four times a day. That's not a problem when I'm reading web pages or even downloading files but it would cause problems during a phone call. My ISP offered me a bundled Internet/IP phone combination for about $7 less per month than an Internet/existing landline one. I'm glad I decided to keep the landline.
$10 + taxes and fees seems a bit steep, considering that Ooma is < $4.00 once the equipment is fully amortized.
The other odd thing is that "We can’t bring Fiber Phone to everyone at the same time, so we’re doing it in phases.". Given how few fiber customers there are, I'm wondering why that is..
Fi doesn't offer data-only plans. You can add data-only SIMs to your main account, but nobody gets out of paying the $20 base rate for unlimited calling and SMS/MMS.
Am I the only one who thinks this is very very expensive? I use an Italian VoIP provider. The rates for international calls are very similar, but I don't have to pay a monthly fee. So I end up charging 6 euros every 4-5 months.
I get that Google is doing this (Fiber) in order to improve internet service, which is in it's best interest. But I can't help but feeling like there is some other goal here.
