sms <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:
> On 6/26/2023 11:12 PM, AJL wrote:
> > On 6/26/2023 10:21 PM, Joerg Lorenz wrote:
> >
> >> Sound quality of landlines is still superior to mobile connections.
> >
> > I was chatting on the phone with the wife tonight. She's visiting
> > relatives in ID while I'm still in AZ (USA). The call was so clear that
> > I could hear and understand folks talking in the background. Better than
> > any landline I remember from the past. But perhaps landlines have
> > improved here too..
>
> Jorge is wrong of course?.
>
> HD Voice on a mobile phone is far superior to a POTS copper landline
> connection unless you're a very weak mobile signal area.
>
> "Since an HD voice call is defined as delivering at least twice the
> sound range of a traditional phone call, an HD voice call will have a
> range of about 7 kHz -- or more." Copper tops out at about 3300 Hz.

Joerg is not wrong, because he was describing VOIP ("VOIP is standard
anyway."). VOIP isn't "Copper".

Whether the sound quality of (VOIP) landlines "is still superior to
mobile connections", is probably mainly dependent on the quality of the
handsets involved. A landline handset is likely to have a better
microphone and a larger speaker than a mobile handset.

Yes, we still have a (VOIP) landline. Mainly because of cost-reasons
and having a different failure-mode than our smartphones.

> However the number of landlines that still have a dedicated copper pair
> back to the central office is not that great anymore. You may have
> copper between the home the node, then fiber (FTTN) from the node.
> Increasingly you have FTTH and if you're still using an analog landline
> phone then you have some sort of an ATA (analog telephone adapter). Or
> you may have coax to the home from fiber on the pole

Indeed. Our (VOIP) landline is HFC-based (Hybrid fiber-coaxial). I
think 30Mbps is enough for voice! :-)

On 2023-06-26 21:13, AJL wrote:
> On 6/26/2023 5:42 PM, Alan Browne wrote:
>> On 2023-06-26 20:20, AJL wrote:
>>> On 6/26/2023 4:47 PM, Alan Browne wrote:
>
>>>> When I read my cellco. T&Cs for WiFi calling, coupled to what
>>>> happens if I'm traveling outside Canada, and the exceptions,
>>>> etc. I find it less bother to simply leave WiFi calling off.
>
>>> Not sure what you mean here. Perhaps your service is different. My
>>> WiFi Calling automatically uses any WiFi my phone is connected to
>>> and then automatically reconnects to the cell service when it
>>> loses the signal. I haven't had to mess with it in years.
>
>> Just comes down to reading the T&Cs and the many mentions of possible
>> fees
>
> Guess YMMV. No extra fees on mine.
>
>> and some issues wrt to emergency numbers and location services.
>
> My WiFi Calling settings has has an emergency location information page
> where you can enter your address for 911 calls.
>
>> Probably not a big deal, but wherever I go there is sufficient
>> coverage or I can wait for more coverage.
>
> Sounds reasonable. Only once that I can remember that it actually saved
> me. I had no service at a grandkids house. After I hooked to her WiFi I
> had service. From then on when I went there the phone automatically
> hooked to the WiFi and I had service...

If ever I'm caught out ...

--
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
-Ronald Coase

On 2023-06-27 01:21, Joerg Lorenz wrote:
> Am 27.06.23 um 01:13 schrieb AJL:
>> On 6/26/2023 3:06 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
>>
>>> I'm going to dump my landline very soon--not to save money, but to
>>> save me from all the spam I get on it.
>>
>> Yup. I had a lot of spam with my landline too. I subscribed to a spam
>> blocker at the time and that cut them down but didn't eliminate them.
>> With my cell I just leave the Do Not Disturb feature on all the time
>> with only my contacts allowed through. Course I realize not everyone can
>> do that...
>
> Here the market leader and also other providers offer very powerful
> tools to stop that. We do not spam calls anymore. On top Filters can be
> set with variables: "+1*" would ban all numbers from the US as an
> example. Whitelisting is also possible. It takes a little effort but it
> is worth it.
>
> Sound quality of landlines is still superior to mobile connections.

Most of the time the subjective quality is the same. Rare dropouts may
occur - esp. if on the move or in marginal locations. Haven't heard
distortion on a cell call in a very long time.

--
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
-Ronald Coase

On 2023-06-27 03:33, Chris wrote:
> Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
>>
>> An article in the WaPo. I'll put a gift link below.
>>
>> This applies to the US.
>> (Yes, we know Europeans, esp. in the north, are even more "wireless").
>>
>> The data is gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)
>> - who began tracking this around 2000 as they wanted to know if there
>> were correlations to health outcomes. They also worried that cell phone
>> use might reduce their ability to gather statistics (through phone
>> interviews) and skew their data.
>>
>> Key findings (2022).
>> Wireless only: 72.7%
>> Landline and wireless: 25.4%
>> Landline only: 1.3%
>>
>> <<< “People who have cut the cord” — abandoning landlines to rely only
>> on wireless — “are generally more likely to engage in risky behaviors,”
>> Blumberg told us. “They’re more likely to binge drink, more likely to
>> smoke and more likely to go without health insurance.” That’s true even
>> when researchers control for age, sex, race, ethnicity and income. >>>
>
> This sounds completely spurious. Do they offer any plausible reason for how
> landline usage or not affects unrelated behaviours?

Read the article. These are statistician's statisticians.

They're not implying causation.

The main take is more settled, older people (traditional values?) are
less likely to cut the landline. (And in the NE US it is skewed by
Verizon's service offering).

> Or are we all to look forward to debauched lives when we're free of
> landlines? I wonder what's holding us back?

They're not implying that cutting landlines causes risky behaviours.

Did you read the actual article?
--
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
-Ronald Coase

On 2023-06-27 04:32, Joerg Lorenz wrote:
> Am 27.06.23 um 09:33 schrieb Chris:
>> Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
>>> <<< “People who have cut the cord” — abandoning landlines to rely only
>>> on wireless — “are generally more likely to engage in risky behaviors,”
>>> Blumberg told us. “They’re more likely to binge drink, more likely to
>>> smoke and more likely to go without health insurance.” That’s true even
>>> when researchers control for age, sex, race, ethnicity and income. >>>
>>
>> This sounds completely spurious. Do they offer any plausible reason for how
>> landline usage or not affects unrelated behaviours?
>>
>> Or are we all to look forward to debauched lives when we're free of
>> landlines? I wonder what's holding us back?
>
> This article is more for fun. We no nothing about the way the data were
> gathered and the question of statistical relevance is not answered at all.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201906.pdf

Yeah, looks pretty shoddy. /s

--
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
-Ronald Coase

On 2023-06-27 08:27, Frank Slootweg wrote:
> sms <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:
>> On 6/26/2023 11:12 PM, AJL wrote:
>>> On 6/26/2023 10:21 PM, Joerg Lorenz wrote:
>>>
>>>> Sound quality of landlines is still superior to mobile connections.
>>>
>>> I was chatting on the phone with the wife tonight. She's visiting
>>> relatives in ID while I'm still in AZ (USA). The call was so clear that
>>> I could hear and understand folks talking in the background. Better than
>>> any landline I remember from the past. But perhaps landlines have
>>> improved here too..
>>
>> Jorge is wrong of course?.
>>
>> HD Voice on a mobile phone is far superior to a POTS copper landline
>> connection unless you're a very weak mobile signal area.
>>
>> "Since an HD voice call is defined as delivering at least twice the
>> sound range of a traditional phone call, an HD voice call will have a
>> range of about 7 kHz -- or more." Copper tops out at about 3300 Hz.
>
> Joerg is not wrong, because he was describing VOIP ("VOIP is standard
> anyway."). VOIP isn't "Copper".
>
> Whether the sound quality of (VOIP) landlines "is still superior to
> mobile connections", is probably mainly dependent on the quality of the
> handsets involved. A landline handset is likely to have a better
> microphone and a larger speaker than a mobile handset.

In quality mobile phones these things don't matter much - the
engineering of small speakers and microphone transducers is very
different than the "primitive" stuff of traditional handsets.

Indeed the former are engineered for a wider bandwidth, esp. on the
speaker side.

> Yes, we still have a (VOIP) landline. Mainly because of cost-reasons
> and having a different failure-mode than our smartphones.
>
>> However the number of landlines that still have a dedicated copper pair
>> back to the central office is not that great anymore. You may have

None do in recent many decades. A neighbourhood sized area would have
all the local copper gather at an aggregation point from where it is
multiplexed back to a regional switch. That multiplex could be coax or
fibre and would "gather" copper lines at many points on its way back.

>> copper between the home the node, then fiber (FTTN) from the node.
>> Increasingly you have FTTH and if you're still using an analog landline
>> phone then you have some sort of an ATA (analog telephone adapter). Or
>> you may have coax to the home from fiber on the pole
>
> Indeed. Our (VOIP) landline is HFC-based (Hybrid fiber-coaxial). I
> think 30Mbps is enough for voice! :-)

In such systems they will allocate a tiny sliver of BW for VoIP - and
it's not in the same frequency bucket as the IP traffic (or wasn't when
I had a similar setup some years ago). Nor is VoIP in the same TCP/IP
mapping.

(Not talking cheap "Magic Jack" or similar 2nd grade solutions which use
the basic internet connection).

--
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
-Ronald Coase

Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
> On 2023-06-27 03:33, Chris wrote:
>> Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> An article in the WaPo. I'll put a gift link below.
>>>
>>> This applies to the US.
>>> (Yes, we know Europeans, esp. in the north, are even more "wireless").
>>>
>>> The data is gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)
>>> - who began tracking this around 2000 as they wanted to know if there
>>> were correlations to health outcomes. They also worried that cell phone
>>> use might reduce their ability to gather statistics (through phone
>>> interviews) and skew their data.
>>>
>>> Key findings (2022).
>>> Wireless only: 72.7%
>>> Landline and wireless: 25.4%
>>> Landline only: 1.3%
>>>
>>> <<< “People who have cut the cord” — abandoning landlines to rely only
>>> on wireless — “are generally more likely to engage in risky behaviors,”
>>> Blumberg told us. “They’re more likely to binge drink, more likely to
>>> smoke and more likely to go without health insurance.” That’s true even
>>> when researchers control for age, sex, race, ethnicity and income. >>>
>>
>> This sounds completely spurious. Do they offer any plausible reason for how
>> landline usage or not affects unrelated behaviours?
>
> Read the article. These are statistician's statisticians.
>
> They're not implying causation.

Nor am I.

> The main take is more settled, older people (traditional values?) are
> less likely to cut the landline. (And in the NE US it is skewed by
> Verizon's service offering).
>
>> Or are we all to look forward to debauched lives when we're free of
>> landlines? I wonder what's holding us back?
>
> They're not implying that cutting landlines causes risky behaviours.

I know, I should have added a :-^)

> Did you read the actual article?

I did not. I don't follow random links on the internet and don't have
access to WaPo. I have looked at your CDC report.

The data are not self consistent as wireless ppl are also more likely to be
healthier, more active and less prone to diabetes.

I also wouldn't call one day of drinking more than 4-5 drinks at any time
during the last 12 months as particularly risky behaviour.

Reads like a statistical anomaly to me. When dealing with unweighted survey
numbers all sorts can pop up. Even if correcting for some factors.

Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
> On 2023-06-27 08:27, Frank Slootweg wrote:
> > sms <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote:
> >> On 6/26/2023 11:12 PM, AJL wrote:
> >>> On 6/26/2023 10:21 PM, Joerg Lorenz wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Sound quality of landlines is still superior to mobile connections.
> >>>
> >>> I was chatting on the phone with the wife tonight. She's visiting
> >>> relatives in ID while I'm still in AZ (USA). The call was so clear that
> >>> I could hear and understand folks talking in the background. Better than
> >>> any landline I remember from the past. But perhaps landlines have
> >>> improved here too..
> >>
> >> Jorge is wrong of course?.
> >>
> >> HD Voice on a mobile phone is far superior to a POTS copper landline
> >> connection unless you're a very weak mobile signal area.
> >>
> >> "Since an HD voice call is defined as delivering at least twice the
> >> sound range of a traditional phone call, an HD voice call will have a
> >> range of about 7 kHz -- or more." Copper tops out at about 3300 Hz.
> >
> > Joerg is not wrong, because he was describing VOIP ("VOIP is standard
> > anyway."). VOIP isn't "Copper".
> >
> > Whether the sound quality of (VOIP) landlines "is still superior to
> > mobile connections", is probably mainly dependent on the quality of the
> > handsets involved. A landline handset is likely to have a better
> > microphone and a larger speaker than a mobile handset.
>
> In quality mobile phones these things don't matter much - the
> engineering of small speakers and microphone transducers is very
> different than the "primitive" stuff of traditional handsets.
>
> Indeed the former are engineered for a wider bandwidth, esp. on the
> speaker side.

Sorry, I should have been more specific/clear. I wasn't implying
"traditional handsets", i.e. those which also work on a real 'copper'
(POTS) line, but to modern handsets, especially the DECT 'cordless'
ones. Those - especially newer ones (which we have) - are
state-of-the-art and because they're bigger, can be better (than mobile
handsets).

> > Yes, we still have a (VOIP) landline. Mainly because of cost-reasons
> > and having a different failure-mode than our smartphones.
[...]
> > Indeed. Our (VOIP) landline is HFC-based (Hybrid fiber-coaxial). I
> > think 30Mbps is enough for voice! :-)
>
> In such systems they will allocate a tiny sliver of BW for VoIP - and
> it's not in the same frequency bucket as the IP traffic (or wasn't when
> I had a similar setup some years ago). Nor is VoIP in the same TCP/IP
> mapping.
>
> (Not talking cheap "Magic Jack" or similar 2nd grade solutions which use
> the basic internet connection).

Yes, I was just kidding, hence the smiley. Our provider has (had?) a
phone-only offering which includes the required cable-modem, but indeed
has much lower down/up speeds.

On 2023-06-27 09:39, Chris wrote:
> Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
>> On 2023-06-27 03:33, Chris wrote:
>>> Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> An article in the WaPo. I'll put a gift link below.
>>>>
>>>> This applies to the US.
>>>> (Yes, we know Europeans, esp. in the north, are even more "wireless").
>>>>
>>>> The data is gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)
>>>> - who began tracking this around 2000 as they wanted to know if there
>>>> were correlations to health outcomes. They also worried that cell phone
>>>> use might reduce their ability to gather statistics (through phone
>>>> interviews) and skew their data.
>>>>
>>>> Key findings (2022).
>>>> Wireless only: 72.7%
>>>> Landline and wireless: 25.4%
>>>> Landline only: 1.3%
>>>>
>>>> <<< “People who have cut the cord” — abandoning landlines to rely only
>>>> on wireless — “are generally more likely to engage in risky behaviors,”
>>>> Blumberg told us. “They’re more likely to binge drink, more likely to
>>>> smoke and more likely to go without health insurance.” That’s true even
>>>> when researchers control for age, sex, race, ethnicity and income. >>>
>>>
>>> This sounds completely spurious. Do they offer any plausible reason for how
>>> landline usage or not affects unrelated behaviours?
>>
>> Read the article. These are statistician's statisticians.
>>
>> They're not implying causation.
>
> Nor am I.
>
>> The main take is more settled, older people (traditional values?) are
>> less likely to cut the landline. (And in the NE US it is skewed by
>> Verizon's service offering).
>>
>>> Or are we all to look forward to debauched lives when we're free of
>>> landlines? I wonder what's holding us back?
>>
>> They're not implying that cutting landlines causes risky behaviours.
>
> I know, I should have added a :-^)
>
>> Did you read the actual article?
>
> I did not. I don't follow random links on the internet and don't have
> access to WaPo. I have looked at your CDC report.

The link provided is a "gift link" from WaPo - so you don't need
"access" - the link is the access - free of charge.

> The data are not self consistent as wireless ppl are also more likely to be
> healthier, more active and less prone to diabetes.
>
> I also wouldn't call one day of drinking more than 4-5 drinks at any time
> during the last 12 months as particularly risky behaviour.

It's their definition - and it's at "least" 1 day which includes ...

>
> Reads like a statistical anomaly to me. When dealing with unweighted survey
> numbers all sorts can pop up. Even if correcting for some factors.

I'll give credence to the NCHS. I assume they have competent
statisticians and analysts.

--
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
-Ronald Coase

On Mon, 26 Jun 2023 16:13:03 -0700, AJL <noemail@none.com> wrote:

>On 6/26/2023 3:06 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
>
>> I'm going to dump my landline very soon--not to save money, but to
>> save me from all the spam I get on it.
>
>Yup. I had a lot of spam with my landline too. I subscribed to a spam
>blocker at the time and that cut them down but didn't eliminate them.

Spam is almost the only kind of calls I get on my landline. I've told
everyone I know never to call me on it anymore.

>With my cell I just leave the Do Not Disturb feature on all the time
>with only my contacts allowed through. Course I realize not everyone can
>do that...

It's rare that a spammer calls my cell phone.

On Mon, 26 Jun 2023 23:12:24 -0700, AJL <noemail@none.com> wrote:

>On 6/26/2023 10:21 PM, Joerg Lorenz wrote:
>
>> Sound quality of landlines is still superior to mobile connections.
>
>I was chatting on the phone with the wife tonight. She's visiting
>relatives in ID while I'm still in AZ (USA). The call was so clear that
>I could hear and understand folks talking in the background. Better than
>any landline I remember from the past. But perhaps landlines have
>improved here too...

I almost always find the sound quality on my cell phone to be just as
good as on my landline.

On 2023-06-27 10:54, Ken Blake wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Jun 2023 16:13:03 -0700, AJL <noemail@none.com> wrote:
>
>> On 6/26/2023 3:06 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
>>
>>> I'm going to dump my landline very soon--not to save money, but to
>>> save me from all the spam I get on it.
>>
>> Yup. I had a lot of spam with my landline too. I subscribed to a spam
>> blocker at the time and that cut them down but didn't eliminate them.
>
> Spam is almost the only kind of calls I get on my landline. I've told
> everyone I know never to call me on it anymore.
>
>> With my cell I just leave the Do Not Disturb feature on all the time
>> with only my contacts allowed through. Course I realize not everyone can
>> do that...
>
>
> It's rare that a spammer calls my cell phone.

Don't get spam calls much, but do get scam calls on my cell. (Of late,
not much, but they seem to come in waves).

- Chinese "FedEx" immigrant scams (Chinese voice). Apparently under the
wrapper of a FedEx call, these turn into scams to rob Chinese immigrants.

- CRA scams. Calls pretending to be Canada Revenue Agency - "you owe us
x. Pay this way." - these are also ID theft scams trying to get valid
date of birth, full name, place of birth and SIN.

- Overpayment scams (India) - these are aimed at older people and
attempt to get them to log into their bank account on their PC's. Real
bamboozlers. Mark Rober and others prank them right back (YouTube vids).

--
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
-Ronald Coase

On 6/27/2023 7:54 AM, Ken Blake wrote:
> AJL <noemail@none.com> wrote:

>> With my cell I just leave the Do Not Disturb feature on all the
>> time with only my contacts allowed through. Course I realize not
>> everyone can do that...

> It's rare that a spammer calls my cell phone.

Surprisingly I don't get all that many spam calls these days either. I
can usually tell cause they show up as an out of area missed call. But
thankfully with no ring/buzz...

Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
> On 2023-06-27 09:39, Chris wrote:
>> Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
>>> On 2023-06-27 03:33, Chris wrote:
>>>> Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> An article in the WaPo. I'll put a gift link below.
>>>>>
>>>>> This applies to the US.
>>>>> (Yes, we know Europeans, esp. in the north, are even more "wireless").
>>>>>
>>>>> The data is gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)
>>>>> - who began tracking this around 2000 as they wanted to know if there
>>>>> were correlations to health outcomes. They also worried that cell phone
>>>>> use might reduce their ability to gather statistics (through phone
>>>>> interviews) and skew their data.
>>>>>
>>>>> Key findings (2022).
>>>>> Wireless only: 72.7%
>>>>> Landline and wireless: 25.4%
>>>>> Landline only: 1.3%
>>>>>
>>>>> <<< “People who have cut the cord” — abandoning landlines to rely only
>>>>> on wireless — “are generally more likely to engage in risky behaviors,”
>>>>> Blumberg told us. “They’re more likely to binge drink, more likely to
>>>>> smoke and more likely to go without health insurance.” That’s true even
>>>>> when researchers control for age, sex, race, ethnicity and income. >>>
>>>>
>>>> This sounds completely spurious. Do they offer any plausible reason for how
>>>> landline usage or not affects unrelated behaviours?
>>>
>>> Read the article. These are statistician's statisticians.
>>>
>>> They're not implying causation.
>>
>> Nor am I.
>>
>>> The main take is more settled, older people (traditional values?) are
>>> less likely to cut the landline. (And in the NE US it is skewed by
>>> Verizon's service offering).
>>>
>>>> Or are we all to look forward to debauched lives when we're free of
>>>> landlines? I wonder what's holding us back?
>>>
>>> They're not implying that cutting landlines causes risky behaviours.
>>
>> I know, I should have added a :-^)
>>
>>> Did you read the actual article?
>>
>> I did not. I don't follow random links on the internet and don't have
>> access to WaPo. I have looked at your CDC report.
>
> The link provided is a "gift link" from WaPo - so you don't need
> "access" - the link is the access - free of charge.
>
>> The data are not self consistent as wireless ppl are also more likely to be
>> healthier, more active and less prone to diabetes.
>>
>> I also wouldn't call one day of drinking more than 4-5 drinks at any time
>> during the last 12 months as particularly risky behaviour.
>
> It's their definition - and it's at "least" 1 day which includes ...

I'm surprised so few reported as having done that.

>>
>> Reads like a statistical anomaly to me. When dealing with unweighted survey
>> numbers all sorts can pop up. Even if correcting for some factors.
>
> I'll give credence to the NCHS. I assume they have competent
> statisticians and analysts.

They're simply reporting results. There's no narrative nor interpretation.
They may have followed the protocol and provided robust results, but that's
not the end of the story.