The Number You Have Dialed

The Number You Have Dialed was Originally Posted on November 1, 2011 by lavarock

Hawaiian Tel’s union has authorized a strike. Hawaiian Tel is the states largest telephone company. If I have the history right, it was owned by GTE, then Verizon, then the Carlyle Group, a private group. They recently came out of bankrupcy.

I know that someone has to own the company, but I would never have bought it. Why? Well, how much longer do you think phone companies will be around? Although telephones have been around since the 1870’s and have remained more or less the same since then, are they in our future?

Consider the central office, the heart of the phone service. What started as giant boards of plugs and wires with human operators, it transitioned to banks of relays and steppers which made the connections. The noise inside a room of these clicky noises was exciting. Then came the computerized switches with call control options like call-forwarding and voice mail.

Of course, once the systems became computerized, we entered the possibility of duplicating the process on home computers. Similar to the example I have written about with a traffic stoplight system, duplicating the telephone system is not difficult.

A decade or so ago, my computer company had its own voicemail system. It was a system that was about 3 feet tall and a foot or two wide. It used a disk drive t ostore audio (not unlike saving MP3’s on your home computer now.

We also has 2 PBX’s (private branch exchanges) to serve our buildings. I think each PBX also covered a different telephone prefix. In an area code, there are many prefixes, the 3 numbers after the area code. These exchanges can cover a company, part of a city or perhaps a city itself. We had 2 of them assigned to the company. These PBX’s connected office phones to each other, connected them to the voicemail system and then out to the local telephone company for off-site calls.

Today, I can do all this on my $300 computer, while browsing the internet. Instead of connecting phones together with bundles of wires, we now use LAN and routers to control the previous massive wiring system of yester-year.

As detailed here before, home PBX software is free and can do everything the telephone companies can do with theirs, except for free. If I wanted, I can have a telephone in every room with a different numnber, they can be enabled at various times of day so they don’t ring when I am asleep. Calls would be routed to voicemail instead of ringing the phones. I could allow family member calls to ring any phone after hours while others got to voicemail. I have multiple external telephone numbers which point to my system and can be answered by the system with different voicemail system. Perhaps one could have a “Press 1 for service” type telephone tree. Telemarketer calls can be automatically routed based upon their caller-id to a hold circuit with elevator music and no possibility of a human ever answering the call, all the while being told “You call is very important to us, you are caller number 1 in the queue. Someone will be with you soon.”

I have two or three Voice over IP services which I use instead of a local telephone service. Whether I use the PBX software or not, by using just an adapter and my existing high speed internet connection, I can have local and long distance telephone service for $15 a month compared with $40 a month for a similar service from a local telephone company.

Simple telephone systems can involve a system like MagicJack where you connect a telephone to your PC. Skype can use your PC and a headset to do similar calls. Vonage and Packet8 use an adapter, a telephone and the internet to make calls with a monthly fee. Ooma has a lower monthly cost. Then there is ObiHai which operates a bit more like the PBX system. It uses an optional telephone, optional telephone line (like from your home telephone company), the internet to pass calls to the world and Google to handle the free long distance calls. This particular system costs about $50 for the hardware and a free Google Voice account with free voicemail. While it does not have all the options of a PBX, it can route calls based upon least cost routing, just like the big guys.

Remember the local telephone company and the strike? I won’t comment on whether the strike is justified or not. The company is trying to reduce costs and the union is trying to ensure their members are treated properly. While they work out their differences, the public continues to look to other alternatives. In my case, the internet comes to me via cable, but could just as easily come by satellite. Some of the most connected countries are ones who didn’t have landlines strung across the land, and then added cell towers and cell phones.

With the advent of cellphones, the massive banks of airport telephones have almost completely disappeared. No more wires needed for those phones, nor people to remove the coins from them. Whole exchanges of telephone numbers have opened up for reuse (which is probably where Google gets their numbers to assign to you for free).

While working at that company decades ago, we had deaf employees who had to resort to a specialized TTD teletypewriter or a specialized service witha human talking to one of us and typing the answer to the deaf person. Nowadays a text message directly would suffice.

We also used to subscribe to a similar telephone company service with translators so that we could communicate with people in foreign contries. Now my Andriod phone can do that. I speak into the phone, it converts the speech to text and then the text to a foreign language. Then using text to speech it will speak my converted text in the foreign language. This is very similar to a Star Trek Universal Translator

A while back, Verizon changed their base charge for text messages from 2 cents to 10 cents each, unless you bought a bundle of text messages. This is because people started using texting instead of voice calls.

Many people would gladly give up their home telephone service if there were easier ways to do faxing or handle alarm systems.

So as we go forward, I see more people using services not supplied by a local organization.