Sprawling networks can be upgraded with gateways and bridges where wholesale replacement isn't viable. Rural services (telephony, electricity, water, gas, sewerage, postal, ...) are often noneconomical and in the US there's a long tradition of either cooperatives or government-run (often municipally-organised) services, and/or steep subsidies.
The legacy assumptions built into PSTN seem to be getting in the way. Simple dumb terminals with no logic greater than being able to generate pulses or tones, logic in centralised switches (which should make upgrading more viable). Identity presumed to be based on the device and circuit, rather than the person at the end of the line (in the increasingly rare cases where a person is in fact at either end of the line). Stronger authentication, and different levels of authentication, are both necessary. (And some preservation for anonymous communications, within the constraints of technologically mediated telecoms platforms, is also useful --- it has its place.)
I'm also fearful that such a system will become captured by a single entity and not offer interoperability --- the long line of personal messaging systems offered by a string of Internet monopolies and would-be monopolies suggest the position has some appeal, if it's difficult to attain. MCI, AoL, Microsoft Messenger, Google's litany of extirpated chat apps, Facebook, Discord, Telegram, Signal, Protonmail, etc.
In its early years telephony was exclusive, and for much of its existence, expensive. Those cost barriers to usage meant that the worst abuses of the system were avoided (though the annoyance of telephone solicitation were still remarked on).
I'm not sure how or where volume increased, though Google Ngram shows "telemarketing" and a set of related terms taking off in the 1970s and 1980s:
> Sprawling networks can be upgraded with gateways and bridges where wholesale replacement isn't viable. Rural services (telephony, electricity, water, gas, sewerage, postal, ...) are often noneconomical and in the US there's a long tradition of either cooperatives or government-run (often municipally-organised) services, and/or steep subsidies.
this is really overly optimistic, you underestimate how moribund the traditional telco/copper POTS line/dialtone service is. the various ILECs around the USA and their patchwork of territories are putting the bare minimum into keeping some of this stuff running. nobody is going to retrofit custom gateways into their network.
they'll spend money on lobbyists and lawyers to fight back against doing anything other than maintaining the status quo instead.
Exactly. Back in the early 2000s there was a flurry of activity as telcos replaced old Nortel and Lucent TDM switches with IP ones made by CopperCom, Metaswitch, Taqua and the rest but a lot of that was funded by govt funds (eg USDA RUS) and even then those companies could not do anything about the copper access wiring leading into tbeir shiny new switches. So you had this weird situation where a sleek, all IP softswitch was talking IP to a gateway which spoke some TDM thing to an even older SLC96 with a gazillion copper loops hanging off of it.
I think that all those companies are dead or acquired now.
The legacy assumptions built into PSTN seem to be getting in the way. Simple dumb terminals with no logic greater than being able to generate pulses or tones, logic in centralised switches (which should make upgrading more viable). Identity presumed to be based on the device and circuit, rather than the person at the end of the line (in the increasingly rare cases where a person is in fact at either end of the line). Stronger authentication, and different levels of authentication, are both necessary. (And some preservation for anonymous communications, within the constraints of technologically mediated telecoms platforms, is also useful --- it has its place.)
I'm also fearful that such a system will become captured by a single entity and not offer interoperability --- the long line of personal messaging systems offered by a string of Internet monopolies and would-be monopolies suggest the position has some appeal, if it's difficult to attain. MCI, AoL, Microsoft Messenger, Google's litany of extirpated chat apps, Facebook, Discord, Telegram, Signal, Protonmail, etc.
In its early years telephony was exclusive, and for much of its existence, expensive. Those cost barriers to usage meant that the worst abuses of the system were avoided (though the annoyance of telephone solicitation were still remarked on).
I'm not sure how or where volume increased, though Google Ngram shows "telemarketing" and a set of related terms taking off in the 1970s and 1980s:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=telemarketing%...