Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Fiber Phone

fiber.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 134 posts

Re: Google Fiber Phone

#31

Post by drzaiusapelord »

rayiner wrote: post #6

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 pe…

>Before cell phones and VOIP

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.

Re: Google Fiber Phone

#32

Post by grahamburger »

soyiuz wrote: post #21

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.

Re: Google Fiber Phone

#33

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #6

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 pe…

[deleted]

Re: Google Fiber Phone

#34

Post by matthewmcg »

rayiner wrote: post #6

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 pe…

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.

Re: Google Fiber Phone

#35

Post by mikestew »

themartorana wrote: post #20
rayiner wrote: post #6

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 pe…

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. :-)

Re: Google Fiber Phone

#37

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #6

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 pe…

[deleted]

Re: Google Fiber Phone

#38

Post by cpach »

matthewmcg wrote: post #34
rayiner wrote: post #6

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 pe…

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.

Facetime Audio is great. Very big difference compared to a regular cell phone call.

Re: Google Fiber Phone

#39

Post by drzaiusapelord »

superuser2 wrote: post #16

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 h…

>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.

http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/

Re: Google Fiber Phone

#40

Post by [deleted] »

hnrodey wrote: post #30

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 ki…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN