Maybe someone with some influence might be listening.
There are so many 10 digit areas now, I would like to see a change in the way the phone service works. I think it would be pretty easy to implement if the right person listening.
You should be able to dial any 10 digit number. If it is a local call then the call would just be automatically connected.
The change would be if you dial a long distance number. You should get a recording saying.......the number you have dialed is a long distance number. If you are willing to pay for the call press 1, if not please hang up.
This replaces the recording.....It is not necessary to dial a 1 before making this call. It also replaces the recording......I am sorry you must first dial a 1 before making this call. It also makes it unnecessary to dial the number again.
Mine works that way now: I use Vonage. I don't CARE whether the number is in my area, the U.S., Canada, or Mexico. I have to dial some extra digits to reach the UK or EU, but I don't have to worry about the cost.
In fact, with Vonage, I can get an area code for my home phone that translates into any area of the country. If I want my customers to think I'm in New York, I can get a 212 area code. If I want them to think I'm in Los Angeles, I can get a 714.
Our long distance bill (at three-cents/minute) still cost our company over $200/month. For $19.95 all that went away. That's $19.95 flat for a telephone number and all the extras: touch-tone, caller-id, call-waiting, call-forwarding, voice-mail, etc. No 911 access fee, universal service fee, Al Gore tax, Spanish-American war tax, fuel surcharge, blah-blah-blah.
I had Vonage and it sucked. The calls constantly broke up and there was always an echo. They also pulled a bait and switch on me for a fax line and charged me 3x as much as they stated on the phone. I switched to packet 8 and that sucked even worse, same connection problems as vonage but the worse customer service. At least vonage tried to improve the situation while I sat for days waiting on a response from packet 8.
Services like Vonage and Packet8 can only be as good as the quality of the ISP you have, and never as good as "digital phone" the cable company offers directly. This is because the cable providers have allocated network resources to tie directly into Ma Bell, the traffic never has to be routed over the Internet.
I know. Vonage & Packet8 can utilize any broadband connection (cable or DSL, not satellite). The problem is those services rely on the Internet and all the TTL issues that can come up due to routing. With Digital Phone purchased through Comcast, Time-Warner, Cox, etc... you get a dedicated line from your home to the cable head end, where your call is connected there, not routed all over the Internet competing with p*rn, movies, and warez downloads.
I wish someone could point to a "digital phone". They don't exist.
They are all analog. Pick-up an old rotary phone from the 30s at a garage sale and they (usually) will work if properly connected to a common dial tone. Talk about backward compatibility!
I respectfully disagree. (Wait! This is usenet.) Your muther wears combat boots! HA!
Cable telephone service is "dedicated" until it reaches the voice port/RT/conversion box/whatever, usually mounted on the outside of your house. Some have the converter box inside the house.
There it is converted to digital. It then "rides" the common, coaxial cable. The digital signal is then processed elsewhere and connected to the common, public switched network.
The incumbent telco provides [drum roll] Digital Phone Service, too. They did for YEARS before the cable companies even began offering dialtone.
The difference is that your analog phone service is carried on a dedicated copper pair for a greater distance than just the back of your house: Often several miles to the Central Office. There, it is converted to a digital signal and connected to the public, switched network. Sometimes, the copper pair runs to a nearby, neighborhood remote terminal or pair gain system. There, then, is where the analog-to-digital conversion takes place.
Don't be too impressed by the concept of Digital Phone Service. With the possible exception those whose hearing is through the use of a cochlear implant, we all have analog ears. Thenk-kew.
They definitely do exist. Cisco has a whole commercial grade line of VOIP phones. One the consumer level there are a substantial number of digital VOIP phones available, particularly integrated cordless units.
The above noted units definitely will not operate on a traditional telco loop.
Not dedicated line, dedicated bandwidth, not subject to impact from cable modem service. And unlike Vonage et al, once you reach the head end, you connect to a "real" telco type switch and dedicated interconnects to the traditional PSTN, while the Vonage users just get aggregated with the cable modem traffic from the other nodes in the cable system and dumped out on trunks to the Internet backbone. Very different data paths.
Yes, they typically place their equivalent of a SLIC at the house demarc point and support traditional analog POTS devices inside the house.
Yes and no. There isn't a lot of coax left in the cable company's plants these days, most are "fiber to feeder" with fiber optics from the head end out to many local nodes, each serving a relatively small number of homes ~25-250 depending on the system. Rather similar to the telco's RT setup with a remote terminal unit of SLICs serving a housing development with fiber back to the CO.
Well, sort of. They've certainly used digital trunks for years, but the digital portion didn't get anywhere near the residential users. Big businesses may have had digital trunks to their buildings however since it made for more efficient use of the outside plant, getting some 24 voice channels on a single pair vs 1 voice chan per pair for residences.
You need to re-evaluate your concept of "dedicated" as it applies to a broadband medium. The cable companies digital phone services may share the same physical plant with other signals, but this does not meant that the phone service does not have dedicated bandwidth. Think of even your basic voice T1 where some 24 voice channels are sharing the same copper pair, but each has it's own dedicated bandwidth.
Yep, humans are rather analog. The same applies to TV and the new digital ATSC / HDTV, it may be all digital right to the display device, but it's still analog to the eyeball.
When I hear "digital phone" used in the context of home use, I think of the digital cordless phones, which are indeed digitally encoded between the handset and base station. And a big improvement over the analog cordless phones in terms of reliability and security. Most are spread spectrum today, which is a digital technique that offers a reasonable level of security, especially compared to the old analog cordless.
Regarding the OP's suggestion, this is an issue that is particular to his local phone carrier. Here in NJ with Verizon, I just dial 10 digits all the time and the calls go through whether in state or long distance, without dialing 1 first.
Also, it's worth noting that all calls have been digital, in most cases for a major part of their journey for many decades. The traditional phone line is analog back to the central office or SLC, where it gets digitized for switching and routing. If it's going from NJ to CA, it's been digital long before the internet, using the existing phone system. That's how they can handle millions of calls, by doing it digitally on fiber, even before the internet.
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