Enter the world of VoIP, or Voice Over IP. Now, before you call me a Luddite, I am firmly of the opinion that technology does have a role to play in connecting people together in a meaningful fashion. I kid you not, I once found a cluster of three gas stations: One had a payphone pole but no payphone, one had a payphone that got a dial tone but the coin slot was jammed shut, and the third had no dial tone! The point is that “real” phones have become scarce, and I believe strongly that people no longer realize, or perhaps even remember, how good quality, how rich, how real a conversation on an old analog telephone can be.
I can all but guarantee that while you will find many aluminum shells and abandoned poles, finding a real, working payphone will take some real sleuthing. I like to play a little game called “Find the payphone.” Step outside and see how many payphones you can find in five minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes. But when someone finally does pick up their cell phones to make a call, how do they judge the sound quality? What metric do they use to assign a value? To many, perhaps most, not having any static or dropouts is “good enough.” But either they are satisfied too easily or do not remember what a high quality, high fidelity conversation over the telephone can sound like.Īccording to a July 8th, 2014 CBS News article, 40% of Americans no longer pay for and use a landline at home. Call me biased, but there is something definitely missing on the social side with the rampant texting that is now the norm. Embodied in the ubiquitous iPhone, a trip to the local mall or supermarket finds people with their heads planted firmly in their phones, eyes down, trudging along. The most common symbol of the this onslaught is the cell phone, going from a bulky box in the eighties to the flip-phone of the nineties to the slide-out keyboard of the early 2000s, and, finally, the capacitive touch screens of today’s glitzy marvels. We live in a world surrounded by RF, by radio waves, invisible to the naked eye and penetrating our homes and our very persons.