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 yet it worked with astonishing reliability. And, to put it in modern terms, all of it was for just one single "app:" voice calls.
It all began moving to digital relatively early in the 60s, but even well into the 90s many systems were still functionally analog, with copper wire pairs carrying analog signals in a /not-metaphorical/ loop between callers.
Today we have comparatively infinitely greater capacity and capability, and there's no going back, but the "core experience" of the modern voice "app" is without a doubt a pale reflection of its original progenitor.
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 people feel for the past decades.
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.
What? My Zoom call (I actually use MS-Teams) can include dozens of people, with video, who are from all over the world. The old phone system wasn't able to do that - especially at the cost of Zoom. People today would be shocked to know what our monthly phone bill cost was back in the day in today's dollars and the lack of value purchased for that money.
Not really. Transmissions were perhaps reliable, clear and fixed, low latency, but the bandwidth was still quite limited (64kbps). I still remember first time I used the yahoo! voice chat (VoIP using DSL on my end) with a decent sound card and head-set. It sounded like my peer was in the same room (1v1, voice only then -- with multi-party the sound quality degenerated quickly).
The reliability, clarity, and fixed low latency were nothing to sniff at, and ISDN didn't lose on quality by any means. In a different universe, it might have gone on to be a dominant technology.
The data rate was 64kbps. The audio frequency bandwidth of G.722, the most widely compatible codec over ISDN, is about 7kHz. Typical analog phone line bandwidth was about 3kHz, so a single ISDN BRI D-channel call was already twice the bandwidth of analog. This was sufficient for ISDN to be suitable for links between sports arenas and FM broadcast stations, for example. Other codecs with better compression (like MPEG) over bonded D-channels for 128kbps, could provide more like 20kHz audio bandwidth (in stereo!), which is close enough to "broadcast quality" 22kHz to be useful for coast-to-coast broadcasts and remote studio recording.
In our timeline, however, Carterfone and the breakup of AT&T opened the doors for all kinds of development in voice-band modem technology. 56K modems were good enough, and they worked with existing last-mile equipment on existing POTS lines, leaving ISDN to find a niche with small business and broadcast. When "always-on" DSL entered the market to compete for Internet subscribers, ISDN was finished. People cared more about data rates than latency, more about the Internet than point-to-point links, and the market ISDN was aiming for had moved on by the time it arrived. Rapid deployment of fiber and T1/E1 quickly ate up whatever was left of ISDN's apple... not because ISDN wasn't very good at what it did, just because people didn't much care about what it was good at.
Which, I suppose, brings us back to the point of the article: advances come with drawbacks.
Unconvinced. In the same room you wouldn't wear a head-set, would you? :-)
Also Mumble at 64kbps can sound really good. Anyways, didn't do/have that the time, so no comparison.
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.
But not in the 2nd/3rd world or in rural areas or poorer areas in the first. I would suggest that the ubiquity was in the wealthiest sections of the 1st world, not the western world.
There is also something incredibly "simple" about the end result of an analog connection - literally a pair of wires connected across thousands of miles.
Digitalization has added so many layers people don't even know - it's sad that there aren't many actual direct analog connections you can make anymore to see how "realtime" it was.
I remember overseas calls having a huge lag. Now I can call across and works and chat with perfect audio and video.
I think we’re romanticizing the past and failing to recognize the ways in which calls are so much better.
Yeah, the delay on digital phone calls still trips me up. It's nothing like being face-to-face or an analog call. I'll take the static, just give me sub-20ms latency!
Yes, this is the point I wanted to raise. It's not just phones. The first minute of everything is torture now. It takes minutes to turn on the TV and navigate menus and establish connections to sources and get to the point where everything is buffered and playing smoothly. I watch a lot less TV than I did when I was younger, despite the vastly expanded amount of content that is available, because it's just too much trouble.
Other appliances are similar. Playing music, you used to turn on the radio and maybe dial in a station. Or put a record on the turntable, or a cassette tape in the deck and press "Play".
Appliances much the same. You had power and maybe one or two analog dial controls. Controls in your car were the same. Everything was tactile. Feedback was both physical and immediate. Nothing needed accounts or logins or apps to use.
It doesn't have to be. If your devices support HDMI-CEC[0], then you can turn on 1 device and everything sets itself up. For example, I can turn on my PS4 and it automatically turns on the TV and sets the correct input.
It all began moving to digital relatively early in the 60s, but even well into the 90s many systems were still functionally analog, with copper wire pairs carrying analog signals in a /not-metaphorical/ loop between callers.
Today we have comparatively infinitely greater capacity and capability, and there's no going back, but the "core experience" of the modern voice "app" is without a doubt a pale reflection of its original progenitor.