1984-earlier telephones,MA bell era...

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The landlines here, at least since digital switching rolled out beginning in 1980, were split 50:50 between Ericsson and Alcatel systems. Before that we used Ericsson crossbars and code switches assembled and localised in Ireland and Strowger step-by-step made mostly by STC I'm England.

In Europe generally in the digital era: Ericsson AXE. Alcatel's E10 and S12 (originally ITT System 12), Siemens EWSD (originally developed by Siemens, Bosch and DeTeWe), Nokia DX and then you've smaller national ones like : GPT/Plessey Marconi System X (UK), Thomson MT 25 (France), Italtel (Italy) and a few others. You'd find some non European, mostly Nortel, Lucent, Fujitsu and NEC equipment in some maskers too.

In recent years Huawei is the BIG challenger to those companies.

For phones here in Ireland they were mostly made by Northern Telecom, including an Irish version of their interpretation of the classic 500 phones, LM Ericsson, Kirk Telecom of Denmark who made some very cool ones, Hagenuk or Germany and and the UK's GEC and STC.

I just miss the old classic vibe the old marketing had. Yea, it cost ridiculous money to make a call compared to today and there was no competition, but it still had a sort of "solid" high quality feel :)

1987 Irish Telecom advert:

Lots of Irish locally made Northern Telecom Harmony phones.
I still have one in daily use! It's over 30 years old.

 
Special offer Ireland-USA for "less than a pound a min.&



They used a very classic 1980s phone that was common here in those days. It was a licenced Daniah design.

With inflation (used an online calculator). That's €2.39 per minute or about $2.80 in 2017 money!
 
We have pre-80s WEs strictly...

with the steel bottom plates and bulletproof construction... a few Trimlines, some Princesses, in varying colors, some '60/70s wall phones, some rotary jobs. I absolutely HATE cellphones, and if the PTB get rid of landlines, they will have to pry the WEs from my cold dead hands.
 
Sound quality

Of course I have a cell phone, for safety when I am out driving, if nothing else. But the sound quality is crappy compared with my landline. And the landline handset is much nicer to hold. Obviously there is not much enthusiasm for sound quality in anything. Much music is listened through Bluetooth speakers, and not in Stereo. Or earbuds from mp3's. Even "landlines" that are voip using the internet have crappy sound. I know the technology allows for better sound, there must not be a great demand for it.
 
In the Bell System prior to the break up everything was of course WeCo, after the break up there was a large push to transition all switching over to digital. This push was to greatly reduce operating costs, as all electromechanical switching equipment/offices required on site crews at all times constantly maintaining the equipment. With the switch to digital the crews were reduced dramatically, which nowadays is typically down to 1 person if that even.
But with that change was opportunity to use different network vendors, particularly Northern Telecom and Siemens. Those are the vendors Ameritech used in my area.
The earliest digital switch gear were WeCo 5ESS, then after the breakup and into the 90s they used Northern Telecom DMS100's, and in the late 90s and up into the current decade they used Siemens DE4 switches. Now believe it or not we had several switching offices remaining in Chicago that weren't digital, still using the 1AESS switch which was the last of the digitally controlled electromechanical switches. They took the last few out of service sometime between 2012-2014. The CO that served our house was 1AESS from when it was built in 1977 until the late 90s when it was replaced with a Siemens switch.

When it comes to wireless networks in the US, Nokia and Ericsson are the dominant equipment vendors. All four carriers use them. AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint use Nokia in various regions via Nokia's merger with Alcatel-Lucent. Those carriers are now replacing that ALU gear with Nokia gear as time goes on. T-Mobile used Nokia when it was known as NSN, and continues to use them as well as Ericsson. Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T use Ericsson in various regions as well. Samsung also has a presence here as a network vendor via Sprint.
In the Chicago area for instance, Sprint uses Samsung and Nokia, Verizon & AT&T use Ericsson, and T-Mobile uses Nokia.

When I traveled overseas to Taiwan I discovered two of the largest carriers on the island use Ericsson. The Taiwanese will not let mainland Chinese gear into Taiwan due to concerns about them using it to spy on them.
 
phone quality

I was paying, a few years ago, a little over $40/month for my landline through AT&T. I purchased an Ooma Telo, and use it now with my cable internet. It costs me roughly $3.45/month. Does it sound as good? Probably not. And, of course, should my internet die, so does my phone service. However, I do have a cell phone, and being retired, that's a big monthly difference in cost for very little difference in usable quality. My friends and acquaintances didn't even notice when I switched services because Ooma kept my old, decades-long land line number.
 
VoIP varies depending on how it’s done.

Some of the best physical phones you can buy these days are all high end VoIP desk phones. The stuff they make for PSTN is usually very cheap junk in comparison.

Also depending on how the calls are being handled and routed, VoIP sound quality is potentially vastly superior to POTS services. If you’re using good hardware and wideband audio codecs, it sounds at least as good as FM radio.

PSTN uses pretty horrible codecs and companding algorithms to process audio.

If you’re using “over the top” VoIP service on a public internet connection with suboptimal conditions, then VoIP is painful. If it’s properly setup and using low latency connections and QoS (quality of service) management, it’s far superior to ISDN.

G.729 = bad quality VoIP and is commonly used. It’s what gave VoIP a bad reputation.
G.711 = same CODEC as the digital PSTN uses. Comparable to a single channel ISDN line.
G.722 = wideband voice. This is also possible on the ISDN networks. It’s much superior to PSTN.

The problem is a lot of people experience bad quality VoIP and then assume it’s all awful. In reality you’re likely to be already using VoIP as a lot of voice providers already use it in their core networks.

If VoIP is done right, your old Western Electric phone, plugged into an ATA that can handle pulse dialling, should sound as good or better than on POTS.

And a well built high end SIP phone should be as good as any of its ancestors.
 
The 1930's WE 201A pictured in Reply #11 photo #5 is exactly what the parents of my mom's best friend had in their bathroom.  As a kid, I thought it was the coolest thing ever to be able to answer a phone call while on the john. 
 
John, I'm also running an OOMA here and upgraded so that all calls to my cell number ring through to the house. Coupled with a vintage Panasonic PBX, all the rotary phones in the house are now touchtone capable, and all ring at full strength. Plus I can call any other phone by dialing a 2-digit extension.

I've actually got a vintage outdoor phone booth from an independent (red enamel panels) that I need to setup and wire into the network. Should be fun once it's all wired up.
 
Land lines

A lot of land lines don't go directly back to the CO anymore. They go through muxes or concentrators that are powered at the site, and have batteries for backup. If the utility service and the batteries fail, you no longer have service, even though the CO is still operating. We found this out the hard way in the 2011 tornado outbreak, when our land line failed the next day and didn't come back until power to the neighborhood was restored five days later. So the reliability advantage usually touted for land lines isn't necessarily there. Cell service in the neighborhood kept working, although you had to try for a while to get a call through.
 
We used to have two landlines. The one with the DSL came out of the Remote Terminal. The original one came out of the CO about 3.5 miles away. When ordering a new line they will by default connect to the CO and not the RT.

In regards to voice quality, a properly done VoIP setup sounds just as good if not better than POTS service. POTS used G.711 and VoIP typically uses that by default as well, so VQ theoretically should be identical and it usually is. I have all the analog phones plugged into an ATA, one that I can adjust all the electrical parameters on and have set it to the same specs the PSTN ran on and have verified with a simple meter that it's working like it should. I even adjusted the receive and transmit volume on the ATA to be identical to the typical POTS line. Most ATA's by default come with the tx/rx cranked way up causing distortion. I am as close to a true landline as I can get on my cheap Obi100 ATA without having an actual landline.
The internet aspect of VoIP is the real tricky part, the public internet was never designed to carry time sensitive live voice packets and can be very fickle about transmitting them without major flaw. It is key to have a decent QoS setup on the home router to at least ensure the VoIP quality isn't being trashed by other data using applications running on the LAN. Once it gets past the router and onto the public internet, anything goes.

If you have cable VoIP or telephone company VoIP like AT&T Uverse voice, it is the same SIP protocol as any other VoIP provider but the traffic stays exclusively on their network where they have full control over it, and when it has to leave their network it travels over the PSTN where voice traffic has its own dedicated pathway. So none of the potential issues one may suffer by using standalone VoIP is an issue with these cable/phone company services.

As for Ooma, it's not the best quality in my experience. They don't use the G.711 codec by default, they use a more compressed codec called iLBC. My experience with it has not been so great. You may contact them and have them lock your device to G.711 (which improved things for me a good bit) by following the steps in the link below. I use an excellent VoIP provider, Callcentric, with my ATA and it works very good. Another VoIP provider that will provide an ATA with their service is VoIPo, it is plug and play. (Callcentric requires you provide and setup your own device).
Also, my best sounding phone is an IP phone.

 
early 1960s GTE EL dialight

there is a ~early 1960s GTE rotary model that had an electroluminescent panel lit dial (blue/green glow) one of those would be nice addition to the collection :)
 
VoIP - get a good phone!

VoIP *done right* is great!

A lot of your experiences of VoIP seem to be badly setup, cheap systems with tons of compression..

I've a Gigaset VoIP DECT phone with several handsets as my "daily driver" and a Cisco desk phone that cost over €200 as I have a home office.

(I also still have an old Nortel Harmony phone from the 1980s plugged in too.)

The Gigaset devices and the Cisco desk phone are as good as any analogue or ISDN phone I've ever encountered. They are extremely solid pieces of kit and sound very good.

You have to remember that before they opened the markets and we used to rent phones from the telephone company, they were seriously well built and expensive pieces of kit that were designed to last for decades and be maintained by the phone co. They had metal chassis and heavy plastic or Bakelite parts, removable and replaceable capsule speakers and mics, modular handset, repairable dial / button modules etc etc ... they probably cost as much as a modern iPhone on the 1960s and the phone co easily made it back with rental fees and very expensive calls compared to today.

Since the markets opened and you bought your phone at the nearest supermarket, they're made for a fraction of the price and they very much feel that way. They're very simple devices (and always were) but they're so simple they've ended up being made very poorly.

I have a small business and work with a few people and we use a hosted PBX service. It gives us the ability to transfer calls between each other (and also to mobiles and actually any number in the world) with all the slick professionalism (including proper music on hold) as we would have had with a physical PBX in an office.

I can configure hunt groups, assign different incoming and outgoing numbers (including in other cities) to any extension or group of extensions. It has umpteen different voicemail options, including speech to text. I can send and receive faxes using email without any extra software which is handy for the very, very rare occasion that someone asks for something by fax.

On top of that it now fully integrated with mobile phones.

You can also use the service from any decent internet connection almost anywhere.

When I'm using it in the office is has proper QoS and uses G.711 sounds as good as ISDN voice.

You’re likely already using VoIP as part of the backhaul of your classic landline anyway. A lot of networks are already using VoIP based trunks and core switching. Even if you’re still using an old Class 5 central office switch, it’s very possible that’s talking over IP networks back to a soft switch.

Whether you’re using TDM and ATM or VoIP, the quality should be very similar. If it’s some crappy equipment linking together using bad quality internet connections, it will sound awful. That’s nothing to do with the technology choice.
 
I had telephone service with AT&T for 43 years and I finally got tired of their regular price increases and their terrible DSL service, so 2 years ago I switched to VOIP with Comcast. The service is 10 times better than AT&T ever was, especially the WiFi. And I don’t know how I ever got along without caller ID and all the other enhancements that are included with Comcast Voice. AT&T wanted extra for EVERYTHING, and I wasn’t willing to give one them dime more!

And since our home has prewired phone jacks in every room I wanted to still be able to use our old corded phones and not be limited to cordless only. So, I checked out several You Tube videos on how to set this up, and its really easy. I just opend up the old Bell System service box on the outside of the house and disconnected the AT&T telephone wire connections and posted a note inside that house is connected to VOIP and to NOT RECONNECT the AT&T service wires. Then I backfed the voice signal from the modem/router into the nearest phone jack inside the house, using a splitter so I could also use the jack for a corded phone. Now all the phone jacks have active voice signal. And since the modem/router has a battery backup, if the power goes out, as long as the cable signal is still active we have phone service.

I will never go back to AT&T POTS. They treated me like a customer that they didn’t care about after 43 years of loyal patronage, and 43 years of paying the bill, in full, every month, on time. They are dead to me!
Eddie[this post was last edited: 11/12/2017-13:09]
 
Well Eddie, I don't want to burst your bubble, but you played right into AT&T's hands.  I don't think there's a telco on the planet that wants to provide residential POTS, and that's nothing new.   Residential POTS has always been a losing proposition for them.  Business service has always been how telcos make their money. 

 

Since the advent of wireless service, they're all lobbying with the FCC and state PUCs to allow them to phase out residential POTS as we know it by not requiring them to maintain the copper network.  If they get their way -- and there's little reason to think they won't -- what we know today as POTS will be a wireless hybrid that doesn't require running copper from the CO.  If that level of deterioration in transmission quality doesn't make people switch to VOIP, I don't know what will.
 
Ralph, I did what was best for us at the time. Even if we had stayed with AT&T it wouldn’t have had any influence over their eventual dismantling of the POTS. For the last year that we had them they we constantly on my ass to switch to their Uverse, which I had no desire to do. And not only that, they wanted us to pay for all the installation fees to make this change that would have benefitted them. So, you haven’t burst my bubble, I’m perfectly happy with my decision and I’m not looking back. It is too bad though that a system that worked so well for over hundred years is going to be history.
Eddie
 
AT&T charge for Caller ID?!

I’m surprised at that, particularly as most of those services drive more traffic and thus generate money!

Caller ID and Call Waiting, 3 way calling and Call Forwarding and often voicemail are free here.

The telcos LOVE voicemail because it means more calls connect, no busy tones which means more revenue.

In some cases the mobile networks even make it difficult to remove voicemail for that reason.

The * # “PhonePlus” services were introduced here beginning in 1980 as COs moved to digital tech. Initially they charged both a quarterly rental and also a per use charge for setup / cancelling.

The full list of landline services active on POTS lines here: Call Waiting, Three Way Calling, Call Forwarding Unconditional and Conditional, Hotline (call a preprogrammed number by picking up the phone for 5 secs), Abbreviated Dialling. (Store numbers that you can speed dial wirh XX# like 01#. Alarm Clock Call, Call Return (1471) and Ring back (let’s you know when a busy number is free).
Caller ID is active by default.

You can also activate anonymous call rejection for free on a lot of plans.

The charging for services business model changed sometime in the very early 2000s they just began to turn everything on by default, particularly “Caller Display” (Caller ID) and call waiting.

A lot of the other services like abbreviated dialling and hotline aren’t reallly actively marketed anymore but are active.
 
Eddie, I used to get the same thing from AT&T when I had DSL.  They'd tell me U-Verse is available in my area, but it's not the real thing.  It's just VOIP bundled with Direct TV, and the same low speed internet access as I got with DSL, a whopping 1.2 MBPS.   Every time I'd ask them if I decided to go with U-Verse, would my internet speed be faster than 1.2 MBPS, the answer would be no, and invariably the rep had a tone of disbelief in their voice when they'd say so. 

 

Now that I no longer have DSL, I don't call their repair service for assistance anymore, and that was when they'd make their U-Verse pitch.  I switched to Comcast for high speed access and haven't looked back.  However, if AT&T leapfrogs into fiber service here, I might consider it, as from what I've heard it's much faster than Comcast's best offering and far more reliable.
 

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