Grandma Witch

History of Phones

We have had a lot of trouble with our phone lately. As we have talked to people, they suddenly couldn't hear us but we could hear them. It started me thinking about the history of phones during my lifetime.

In the old days, when I was a child and our phone lines were shared with several families, we used a phone much like the one pictured above. The phones always worked and you could evesdrop on any other person on the same party line. You had to be careful what you said on the phone, but at least it worked.

After the party phone lines, phone techology made great progress and became more private. You actually had your own phone line and the phone became much smaller and had a rotary dial. That was progress! Even if it took forever to dial a number.

Then came the pushbutton phones which made dialing much faster. Then came cell phones, which were very portable, but did not always have the same voice quality as home phones.

Then, some genius, decided that speech over the phone could be converted to data. The speech was converted into multiple packets of information. Those packets could be sent over data lines and reassembled at the other end into speech. This was called VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocal). So the same technology that is used by email can now be used for voice. In fact, this is used by most phone companies to transmit large amounts of voice packets around their networks.

You can get VOIP phone service that services your home from several companies now. Vonage was one of the first providers of this service. Comcast began offering the service along with their internet connection and cable tv service a couple of years ago. All you need is a broadband connection and you could have VOIP. It is actually quite a bit cheaper than the old technology to use.

However, there are some problems with it, as we found out. We used Vonage for a time and it worked pretty well. We decided to go with Comcast cable tv and so we decided to get Comcast Internet connection and their VOIP phone service. After awhile, we noticed that when we spoke with people on the phone, they couldn't hear us, but we could hear them. This happened enough that it became very irritating. So we decided to go back to the old fashioned phone service.

Our phone number remains the same, but our internet access and our email is now different. We decided to use a more generic email address so we didn't have to email our new address everytime we changed internet providers.

Our new email address is the same as the old one, but instead of comcast.net, it is now gmail.com. If this confuses you and we haven't sent an email telling you what it now is, give us a call and we will give you the whole address. We don't want to publish it on our blog.