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The first minute of every phone call is torture now

theatlantic.com

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Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#401

Post by colinsane »

hericium wrote: post #319

Upon reading just the title, I thought this is going to be about prolonged, slowly spoken automatic pre-IVR messages, which appeared during COVID with "due to the current situation, we kindly ask you to be patient because we're understaffed and have more calls". Now it's just unspoken "you learned how to wait during COVID so fuck you and wait", often mentioning opening hours, even when you call during those hours, we…

> Instead, this: Hello? … Wait, hello? Can you hear me? Okay, hold on. Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it. Okay, never mind, I’ll just hold it up to my head. Hi, ugh, sorry about that.

i had basically this same problem just yesterday. for years i would take calls with wired earbuds that had an integrated mic. i upgraded my iphone and now i have to use one of those lightning to 3.5mm adapters for that. the official adapters last for like 2-3 months until they begin flaking. not usually a deal-breaker, because it just means ~0.5s of lost audio every couple minutes but…

a recent iOS update made it so that if the earpiece disappears during a call then the OS drops the call. so i had to redial 3 times during my call. eventually we switched to Facetime, which still disconnects me upon audio drops but leaves the other side connected so that i just have to press “join” instead of redialing.

not an infra issue, but it adds up to the same crappy call experience.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#402

Post by ghostpepper »

namaria wrote: post #361
jmbwell wrote: post #186

Article plays up the fumbling for effect, but is otherwise spot on. The PSTN was immensely overbuilt. Old Western Electric equipment is, literally, built of tempered steel, from the crossbar switches in the CO to the red telephone on the desk. The human artifice erected in between, electrically and mechanically connecting a microphone at one end to a speaker at the other, was staggering in its analog complexity, and…

One thing not taken into account on this rant (and it is just a big rant) is the incredible increase in scale. Nearly everyone has a phone and can make phone calls now and we're almost 8 billion people. The old, understandable, analog system would have never scaled like this. Quality didn't degrade because of greed or degeneracy. It was a trade-off and I say the level of access we have now trumps whatever nostalgia p…

You may be correct that we made the right choice with the tradeoff, but saying that the old system worked better (for those who could use it) is not nostalgia. Audio quality (and communication ability) on zoom is objectively far worse than it was over analog copper lines.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#404

Post by Marsymars »

yabones wrote: post #201
jaywalk wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio quality on cellular is widely variable. If both ends support VoLTE/HD Voice, the audio quality is actually superior to analog.

VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in. This has repeated for every single "improvement" in VoIP technology over its ~40 year history, the tradeoff always goes in the direction of making more money instead of offering better service.

> VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in.

Not just that, it’s also used for additional carrier lock-in!

(In Canada, carriers were barred from selling carrier-locked phones some years ago, but since VoLTE, they don’t support VoLTE functionality on any phones that haven’t been certified for use on their network, which is limited, in practice, to phone models that they sell themselves. Normally this means you fallback to 3G for calling, unless you happen to be roaming with a carrier/country where 3G service has been dropped, in which case you simply don’t get any voice service.)

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#405

Post by qu4z-2 »

Clent wrote: post #234
ryandrake wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I like to look at it is: Imagine a world where the concept of a phone call never existed. Then, suddenly someone invents an app that: 1. Allows an instant, full-screen foreground takeover over whatever else you are currently doing on the device 2. Rings and vibrates your device 3. Has a button that could allow an unknown person to send and receive audio to and from your device 4. All of this is triggered remo…

It's a pocket computer. The phone feature is a legacy feature that goes away with 2G. Soon carriers will only be moving data. The providers have data to show that the phone functionality is not a primary use case. It is a legacy product whose overhead has a real cost on our economy. When do we stop paying $10-$20 a month per lines of service, for the privileging of being interrupted? When do we stop calling it a smar…

Unfortunately it kind of fails at being a good pocket computer (all else aside they got rid of the concept of files and replaced it with nothing). The fact that it fails at being a phone too is just adding insult to injury.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#406

Post by actually_a_dog »

paultopia wrote: post #323

The most interesting part of the linked article is this: Online, ad-riddled, search-engine-optimized webpages offer folk solutions: disconnect Bluetooth; reconnect Bluetooth; factory-reset the earbuds; reboot the phone; and so on. Like a finger trap, these desires for remedy plunge the user only further into the technological murk and its associated despair. How did this happen? It’s really bizarre and weird that it’…

I don't really know, but it seems like you could just short circuit all of that by just answering the fucking phone and not bothering with Bluetootha nd stuff.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#407

Post by pedalpete »

pavlov wrote: post #22

Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails. It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email. It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, sh…

I like where you're going with this, and particularly with the increase of video calls, it's still strange to just pick up and see a person.

The flow I get people into is to communicate via text (slack, whatsapp, etc depending on the nature of the environment) with a "hey, is now a good time to call", or "I wanted to discuss XYZ", and we can then hash out the best method for communication.

The authors complaint is valid, but I think it is more of a UX issue, similar to what you're suggesting here.

Great handle BTW

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#408

Post by andrewaylett »

dylan604 wrote: post #159
dr_dshiv wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about iOS where you cant copy in a number and then edit it? Every time I want to call a foreign number and need to add a country code I need to make a new contact and then edit that.

This one drives me crazy in all iOS phone number entry type situations. once you've dialed in the the 10 numbers, it makes it into whatever that little bubble is called that makes it no longer editable. you have to delete the whole bubble of 10 digits, and start typing the whole number again instead of being able to edit the probably single digit that needs correcting. However, I'm old enough to remember the pain of…

My parents technically don't have a four digit local number any more, but it's the same† national number as it was back then. BT moved two digits from the exchange code to the local part when they digitised the exchange.

†: All UK national numbers gained an extra '1' after the leading '0'; I'm asserting that change doesn't count.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#409

Post by walterbell »

namaria wrote: post #361
jmbwell wrote: post #186

Article plays up the fumbling for effect, but is otherwise spot on. The PSTN was immensely overbuilt. Old Western Electric equipment is, literally, built of tempered steel, from the crossbar switches in the CO to the red telephone on the desk. The human artifice erected in between, electrically and mechanically connecting a microphone at one end to a speaker at the other, was staggering in its analog complexity, and…

One thing not taken into account on this rant (and it is just a big rant) is the incredible increase in scale. Nearly everyone has a phone and can make phone calls now and we're almost 8 billion people. The old, understandable, analog system would have never scaled like this. Quality didn't degrade because of greed or degeneracy. It was a trade-off and I say the level of access we have now trumps whatever nostalgia p…

World population by late 1990s was 6 billion. Landline audio phone calls were reliable with fixed guaranteed bandwidth, albeit expensive. Today there are more people, but has there been a linear increase in 1:1 calls? More bridge/group/conferencing calls, yes.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#410

Post by Wowfunhappy »

antasvara wrote: post #372
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parents do not, as a matter of course, have my cell phone number. It's fine for a few families to have it (because e.g. I had to call them), but if every parent in the program was able to message me at any time of day, I think I'd have a problem. Now, there are other ways this could work. My company has a "director of client services"—let's call her "Anna"—and all parents have Anna's number. So I suppose I could have…

It seems odd to me than an after-school program has no set way for parents to contact the program without going through a relay-style process. I agree that the solution shouldn't be "give out your personal phone number," but it also shouldn't be "rely on a person that's not at the program to relay calls to you." Put another way, how would a parent contact the program in an emergency? They'd likely (as you illustrated…

Y'know, that's a great point. I actually don't know how things look from the parent's side--I can tell you for sure they don't have my number, but "Anna"'s number must be a business phone, as I know parents always have a number they can call.
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