Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

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The phone system. It seems like it's an unholy mess. I moved from the US to Hong Kong this year. I have a US number that I want to keep, and of course I need a local Hong Kong number.

So, the US number is on my Google Fi account that I pay to keep active and I get a prepaid SIM card for Hong Kong. I can switch the SIM cards if I travel back.

But why? We have two semi-independent networks, one for voice and one for data. The voice one is arcane, region-locked (local numbers cannot easily or cheaply make international calls), and subject to all sorts of restrictions and regulations.

The data network can send and receive data to anyone, anywhere in the the world, for practically free. Why are we even bothering with the legacy voice network at this point? Why can't I get one number that works anywhere in the world? Google Fi kind of does. It's great if you live in the US and travel a lot, but I've heard that if you're living outside the US and use it outside the US too much, they'll shut down your account.

Even porting the number to Google Voice isn't a solution. It only works in a few select countries and of course Google might decide to just shut it down at any time, so who knows.

Internet speeds are more than fast enough now even on mobile in most of the world that you should be able to handle voice calls with a data-only plan. If someone figured out the backend to connect it to the legacy telephone system, to just have one phone number that is independent of a carrier that you can access from anywhere with an Internet connection, they'd make a killing.

Voice over IP and it's connection to the old system is basically a solved problem. VoIP is very widespread, e.g. in Germany basically all new landline contracts are VoIP.

Also the backhaul of mobile networks is usually VoIP (references to this on Wikipedia date back to 2011 [1]), i.e. even calls starting and ending over the old analog network are converted to VoIP in between.

So what's stopping us is not technology, but exactly these local carriers with their national phone numbers and often also national law around selling these services (e.g. in Japan you need to identify yourself as a resident to buy a phone number). Why do we still need carriers? Because they are operating the local physical infrastructure necessary to connect your phone to the network.

So the problem to solve is to cooperate on an international level to use the physical infrastructure of a country/carrier free of charge while you are paying a different carrier in another country. We just recently (~2 years back?) "solved" this in Europe ("solved" because it only works within time limits generous enough for long term travel but not for permanent relocation). It will eventually happen on a global scale.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110809025050/http://www.eetime...

Thanks for elaborating. I know there are a ton of details I don't know about for why the phone system is the way it is. It's over 100 years old and I'm sure there's a lot of cruft.

I'd be happy to pay a local carrier for a data connection using their infrastructure. What I'm imagining is an app that lets me get a local phone number anywhere. Calls and texts to that number ring and show up in the app. If I move to a new place, I just get a new SIM card for data and create a new local phone number in the app.

WhatsApp is almost this, except it doesn't manage any of the phone numbers, and I'd really prefer to use something that I can pay for that isn't owned by Facebook. I've taken to giving people in Hong Kong my US number as well since that's what is tied to my WhatsApp account and there is a 90% chance that if anyone here is going to try to contact you, they'll do it through WhatsApp.

> What I'm imagining is an app that lets me get a local phone number anywhere. Calls and texts to that number ring and show up in the app. If I move to a new place, I just get a new SIM card for data and create a new local phone number in the app.

There are several such apps in the iOS and Android app stores. They work reasonably well.

Not to mention, data-only calls are often much higher quality in my experience. Whenever I go from FaceTime audio to regular calls, I can’t believe I used to use them all the time

This is not my experience at all. I've not used FaceTime, but messenger calls are terrible.

I would add to this, why even have "phone service" anymore. I call my family via Facebook Messenger or Zoom etc... I'm surprised that more more companies don't let me call them via these services or that some new startup hasn't starting selling the intergration so a customer can click "connect via Whatsapp" to our customer service.

I'm also somewhat surprised there isn't a standard for this (maybe one is being worked on) so that all services and register for the standard to let me connect.

Further, I'm surprised there isn't work to let me register some contact info in a global way. As it is, when I move, I have to contact 15-30 companies and update my address. Why I can't I just do that in one place and the companies can use the info live?

Yes, I get here are all kinds of privacy issues. Still, there must be some solution. For example, id service providers let me login, change my address, and then select which companies that I've registered to that id get my new address, etc.... I'm going to tell them anyway, just make it less tedious to do it.

> I would add to this, why even have "phone service" anymore. I call my family via Facebook Messenger or Zoom etc.

Emergency services. You can't call an ambulance via Zoom. Even if 911 supported Zoom, Zoom probably won't support 911 because they don't want to be held liable if people die because of a Zoom outage.

Is the phone company liable if there's an emergency and the phone system is down?

Yes it is

Earlier this week, the FCC Fined CenturyLink $400,000 and West Safety Communications $175,000 for a multi-state 911 outage that occurred in August 2018. To resolve the dispute, both companies also entered into a Compliance Plan.

https://www.beyondtelecomlawblog.com/fcc-fines-companies-for...

There is a standard for this which most vendors actually used to support: XMPP federation.

Not surprisingly most vendors also dropped support for this merely in favor of lock-in.

I am totally in agreement with you in principle.

But I've lost count at the number of times all these things have failed me at work and in my personal life, where I've had to resort to "telecom" (just making a voice call, although I do know it's still VoIP, but there are different quality of service considerations and carriers always prioritize these)

I call my 95 year old grandma every week. She doesn't have a cell phone, only a landline. I would guess many if not most older people are similar. If the replacement service doesn't work with landlines then it's dead in the water as a replacement and will only function as an additional option. Going to stay that way for a while as (my assumption is) the group 70+ likely have a large population without call phones.

Not to mention rural communities without adequate cell service.

Perhaps have the option of charging say 2 cents if somebody calls you. An exception list would allow friends and family for free. Phone spam is a growing problem because it's too cheap to robo-call millions of people. If spammers have to pay more, they'll cut down. Plus, money is easier to track. Same for email: we need e-stamps.

In a lot of places, the old PTSN is the only connection. I've been in places where the number of phones in one space made data use impossible, but I could still place a call just fine. In some phones, you can even force data to 1G to use the voice frequencies and avoid using the LTE frequencies.

> Why are we even bothering with the legacy voice network at this point?

Because the government helped to create it, so that it was easy to track and intercept, and there's a lot of infrastructure around those purposes, when they want to use them.

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