On Dec 8, 9:19 am, "Pete C." wrote:
Jim Redelfs wrote:

In article , Homer
wrote:

With Digital Phone

I wish someone could point to a "digital phone". They don't exist.

They definitely do exist. Cisco has a whole commercial grade line of
VOIP phones. One the consumer level there are a substantial number of
digital VOIP phones available, particularly integrated cordless units.



They are all analog. Pick-up an old rotary phone from the 30s at a garage
sale and they (usually) will work if properly connected to a common dial tone.
Talk about backward compatibility!

The above noted units definitely will not operate on a traditional telco
loop.



purchased through Comcast, Time-Warner, Cox, etc... you
get a dedicated line from your home to the cable head end, where your
call is connected there

I respectfully disagree. (Wait! This is usenet.) Your muther wears combat
boots! HA! grin

Not dedicated line, dedicated bandwidth, not subject to impact from
cable modem service. And unlike Vonage et al, once you reach the head
end, you connect to a "real" telco type switch and dedicated
interconnects to the traditional PSTN, while the Vonage users just get
aggregated with the cable modem traffic from the other nodes in the
cable system and dumped out on trunks to the Internet backbone. Very
different data paths.



Cable telephone service is "dedicated" until it reaches the voice
port/RT/conversion box/whatever, usually mounted on the outside of your house.
Some have the converter box inside the house.

Yes, they typically place their equivalent of a SLIC at the house demarc
point and support traditional analog POTS devices inside the house.



There it is converted to digital. It then "rides" the common, coaxial cable.
The digital signal is then processed elsewhere and connected to the common,
public switched network.

Yes and no. There isn't a lot of coax left in the cable company's plants
these days, most are "fiber to feeder" with fiber optics from the head
end out to many local nodes, each serving a relatively small number of
homes ~25-250 depending on the system. Rather similar to the telco's RT
setup with a remote terminal unit of SLICs serving a housing development
with fiber back to the CO.



The incumbent telco provides [drum roll] Digital Phone Service, too. They did
for YEARS before the cable companies even began offering dialtone.

Well, sort of. They've certainly used digital trunks for years, but the
digital portion didn't get anywhere near the residential users. Big
businesses may have had digital trunks to their buildings however since
it made for more efficient use of the outside plant, getting some 24
voice channels on a single pair vs 1 voice chan per pair for residences.



The difference is that your analog phone service is carried on a dedicated
copper pair for a greater distance than just the back of your house: Often
several miles to the Central Office. There, it is converted to a digital
signal and connected to the public, switched network. Sometimes, the copper
pair runs to a nearby, neighborhood remote terminal or pair gain system.
There, then, is where the analog-to-digital conversion takes place.

You need to re-evaluate your concept of "dedicated" as it applies to a
broadband medium. The cable companies digital phone services may share
the same physical plant with other signals, but this does not meant that
the phone service does not have dedicated bandwidth. Think of even your
basic voice T1 where some 24 voice channels are sharing the same copper
pair, but each has it's own dedicated bandwidth.



Don't be too impressed by the concept of Digital Phone Service. With the
possible exception those whose hearing is through the use of a cochlear
implant, we all have analog ears. Thenk-kew.

Yep, humans are rather analog. The same applies to TV and the new
digital ATSC / HDTV, it may be all digital right to the display device,
but it's still analog to the eyeball.



When I hear "digital phone" used in the context of home use, I think
of the digital cordless phones, which are indeed digitally encoded
between the handset and base station. And a big improvement over
the analog cordless phones in terms of reliability and security.
Most are spread spectrum today, which is a digital technique that
offers a reasonable level of security, especially compared to the old
analog cordless.

Regarding the OP's suggestion, this is an issue that is particular to
his local phone carrier. Here in NJ with Verizon, I just dial 10
digits all the time and the calls go through whether in state or long
distance, without dialing 1 first.

Also, it's worth noting that all calls have been digital, in most
cases for a major part of their journey for many decades. The
traditional phone line is analog back to the central office or SLC,
where it gets digitized for switching and routing. If it's going
from NJ to CA, it's been digital long before the internet, using the
existing phone system. That's how they can handle millions of calls,
by doing it digitally on fiber, even before the internet.