Digital is always better in some ways, but of course not in every aspect. There are some cases where the analog mechanism still has merit because it does /something/ that digital cannot – yet it is being phased out anyway because of this naive attitude that digital is wholly superior.

VOIP vs POTS

  • POTS phone lines are powered. When you have a power outtage, that is when it is most important to have POTS. Yet as a society, we are not smart enough to figure this out. We will all be helpless sitting ducks in power outages, unable to communicate.

  • POTS phone lines serve modem and fax transmissions reliably. VOIP is fragile shit. Sure, modems and faxes /sometimes/ /somewhat/ work over VOIP, if conditions are just right… certain codecs must be in play as well as netneutrality (low latency) and QoS. VOIP is ultimately an enshitification.

  • Perhaps we could argue that voice quality is better over POTS than VOIP.

FM radio vs. DAB

  • Advertising is a reality and channel surfing a shit-show on DAB. Every receiver takes a different amount of time to decode the AAC or whatever is in the digital signal. This means when you hear an ad or some garbage, you must wait 5 or so seconds for every single channel change. In principle, a receiver could incorporate 2 tuners to make this quicker. But I don’t think any do this.

  • A bad signal results in silence, which means a lot of people who use clock radios will wake up later than planned. Could also be fixed in receivers, but still all those without such a (currently nonexistent) feature will show up to work late.

fax vs. email

  • Although it’s theoretically possible to have an email service that does not expose your email address to the recipient, such a thing does not currently exist. Email forces us to share our email address w/recipients who we do not trust.

  • Faxes are universally accepted. But e-mail is a shit-show of Google and Microsoft and others being fussy about how a msg is sent, and rejecting on a whim whatever the fuck they want to reject. Faxes do not have this problem. Faxes just work.

  • evenwichtOP
    1·
    21 天前

    The guy got hit by massive spam calls,

    Obviously he did not know what he was doing. Foolish to expose a voice number to gratis 3rd-party fax services. If you do it right you get neither voice spam nor written spam. Sending email and sharing an email address is a good recipe for receiving spam.

    and wasted paper

    Fax does not require paper on either side of the transmission, so no need for waste.

    and toner (thankfully not ink or thermal) like crazy.

    Toner implies laser which wastes substantially more energy than inkjet. But of course the wisest fax recipients don’t bother with hard copies at all in the first place.

    I believe faxes do have some use cases even today, but they are rather fringe.

    That’s because privacy and data minimisation is fringe. Boycotting Microsoft and Google is also fringe.