Landline, Mobile and Video Telephony

Landline is on the way out.

I am told the NBN infrastructure in Australia does not optimally support fixed line telephones as well as the previous arrangements we have had since the invention and installation of the house phone.

Retro phones are sold in decreasing prices and are destined to go the way of the compact disc, television set and analogue media. At least, however, to replace them involves paying less than buying a new smart mobile phone.

The old fashioned phone does not need to be recharged regularly in order to function. It even has a back up battery until the day the NBN contractors arrived at your abode - now you have to cough up replacing with a new battery as the NBN has disenabled the previous back up battery that was working fine.

Both landline and mobile phones are subject to nuisance calls, hacking, fraud and pesty commercial sales. Every human communication opportunity is utilised by the so called slick oily sales person, the threatener, the deranged, the opportunist and the tricky mind. They can turn up at your door, infiltrate through your electronic and digital transactions or place a pesky virus to destroy or manipulate your data. So in the perspective and attitude of such parties, the phone is only a mechanism to possibly deprive your comfort of privacy, sense of integrity and steal your money.

Everyone would recall those irritating landline telephone calls around dinner time,  after you reckon you deserve a rest and quiet time after a long day at work or business. Millennials may not feel the obligation to answer every phone call, but baby boomers on the other hand grew up in an age when one was supposed to be civillised when speaking on the phone.

Fraudsters, trouble makers and the not so pyschologically stable can take advantage of this presumption of civility on the part of people who pick up their ringing phone. However, the negative experience of being on the unpleasant end of nonsense, prank, spam and fraudster calls has made telephone owners more cautious.

Would you pick up calls with unknown or unshown or private numbers? What do you think of pre-recorded messages blaring at your ear when you answer a call? How would you react trying to listen and understand foreign accents on the phone when you did not initiate the call?

With smart phones, you can report, block and prevent the hassling caller from calling again. You may not be able to do that with the landline telephone. In the latter scenario, you most likely do not even know the phone number of the person who has dialled you, unless your fixed base phone supports a number identification ability.   Underlying this experience, a primary matter remains not satisfactorily answered by the Government and the telcos  - who the heck gave access to my phone number?   Even registering one's telephone number in a Government initiative of "don't call me" does not mean a prankster cannot call through.

And then there are Skype, Facetime and other easily accessible video interaction calls. They can be more intimate, revealing and effective, as one can evaluate non verbal behaviours of the participants, apart from the use of the tone of voice. People tend to be on a better countenace profile using such a combined video and voice communication channel.

The average cost of making an international phone call is often higher from a landline. There is also the reduced accessibiliry of phoning from a landline if you are not near this phone.  On the orher hand, voice over the internet protocol calls have significantly reduced call costs.

Concurrently, it is also interesting to note the relative combinations of text versus voice messages. That is why the mobile phone provides a plethora of apps other than just serving as a voice conduit and exchange. In the process, our privacy has been more invaded, compromised and degraded more than when we just held a landline telephone.

#yongkevthoughts

Writing, Communicating and Chatting

I reckon most of us do not receive written personalised letters anymore, nor write any to socialise with others. Even exchanged love notes are in texted electronic messages. Maybe the grocery list is still handwritten.

So called snail mail has been sadly reduced to advertising pamphlets. Contemporary society has practically done away with the pleasures of beautiful handwriting and we are reduced to only being agile with our thumbs.

Elegant writing instruments have become more rare and inevitably redundant. We do not have to sit up properly to communicate - more often than not we are not poised in ergonomic body positions when using electronic screens. 

An increasing number of us are not fully aware of our environment when we text on smart phones walking across busy streets and when driving vehicles. A whole generation has lost the significance of spelling correctly and become infatuated wirh Emojis.

The variety of gadgets to communicate has evolved to portable devices that echo our need to be mobile and have access to our records anywhere we are in the physical world. This has hugely made us depend on wifi availability, a resource which is controlled by only a few players. We can be held captive in this manner when speech and writing are no longer free to be transmitted instantaneously.

Each of us no longer has the thrill of having a private diary buried under a tree or in a secret drawer. Every part of our daily life is recorded by third parties and leaves a trail, even when we electronically delete it.

The shift from use of feathered quills to thumb pressing to write has only taken a few hundred years. It can be both exciting and frightening to imagine the future in this respect. Our records cannot be burned as they are no longer on paper. Yet they can be tampered with, misused and interfered by parties having covert negative intentions, as they can be traced much more easily than with paper documents.

The keyboard still survives but the desktop, email, laptop and tablet are all inevitably headed to oblivion. What is next?

Reflect at how our residential post boxes, email addresses, instant messaging folders and social media inboxes can be saddled with junk stuff and file attachments. There is this dire risk of not having ever being satisfied with whatever capacity is made available.

There may also be no need to write much in the future. We leave verbal messages on phone apps and can ask robots for verbalised answers. 

Yet on the other hand, we do not need to speak on the phone as we can "chat" silently on provider websites that facilitate text conversation formats.

Analytics of our data and images in cyberspace can lead to a new form of political and social control.

Nothing good is free, we do realise there is a cost to be paid for the benefits of on line real time uploading of messages, photos and videos of what we are doing to anyone in another part of the world - provided both sender and recipient can pay for and have access to the new god of wifi.

#yongkevthoughts

NBN - or I shall Never Be Neutered

Now is the time......to get real concerned as to how the NBN is being implemented for ordinary Joe and Jane Citizen across our Great Southern Land.


If we already have a viable existing telecommunications system,  why replace it with something less to be desired?   Can all the public monies used to fund NBN be please better utilised for improving health services, public school education and other areas crying for help in an increasingly socially inequitable country?   And we have a Federal Australian Government which is facing serious issues of balancing the national budget, repaying off huge debts and currently significantly having a large loan interest liability.   Why add to another huge and costly undertaking?


After connecting to the NBN, my landline telephone broke down in services three times in six weeks.  In all my previous many years living in this beloved nation called Australia, I have never had any issues with my landline telephone connection, even with copper wire.   My previous landline phone has never gone dead, until post NBN.


NBN tells me over the phone to just deal with my chosen provider if I have any issues with the NBN installation, pre or post.   NBN cannot help.


The Federal Government talks up of the glories of having NBN, unnecessarily raising expectations in the minds of ordinary people like me.   It is indeed a most exciting time to be an Australian, to know the gap between political talk speak  or hype and the inability of NBN to engage with customers, deliver the technical quality in telecommunications as promised and understand deeply that NBN is not a poster boy for innovation that this country needs.


 My selected provider says a lot of things are subject to NBN control.  As a customer, I am left in the gutter, comparable to between a rock and a hard place.   Providers who deal with the public, like me, need the money plus business - and cannot afford to aggravate the NBN.   They dare not criticise the NBN, period.  


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I am not holding my breadth anymore. 


Speed connection with NBN is nothing better than pre-NBN days, unless I am willing to dish out an additional AUD 30 more per month to upscale my internet speed plans.


My provider tells me there are things that the way NBN does things has a shortfall, but they cannot be criticised, as NBN dishes out the parcel of revenue to eager outsourced providers and contractors  -  as every resident and citizen in continental Australia eventually will face the prospect of having to change over to this god-like entity called the NBN. 


Before I took up NBN connection, I had access to one of the best telecommunications services Australia can be proud of, even if I know other nations are now providing even better and have uplifted the game....but I was content.   The monster in the room is that every one knows that Australia is left behind in this perspective  - excuses are given that 
Australia has such a huge land mass and such a low population, which I recognise as well. 
So I call to the politicians and NBN to factor this constriction that Australia faces - and not promise glorious and better things with NBN installation.   WE are indeed a low population clinging on to a huge land mass.


Now with the NBN installation kicked in, this new arrangement has disenabled my existing back up battery with my landline, which I understand is critical in the event of an electrical supply shut off.    This back up battery is a significant element for the operation of home medical alarms, emergency call systems, fire alarm, emergency lift phones and monitored security alarm systems.


NBN does not tell the public why the back up battery has to be disenabled.  If customers, who have moved on to NBN connections, want to reinstall a back up battery, they have to bear the costs themselves for doing so.


The NBN arrives at your front door with no democratic choice given to you.  No one in person over the phone discusses with the resident about the impending  rollout or its implications.  The attitude from the NBN is "take it or leave it" - showing arrogance to prospective customers, which is rather jarring in a country that promotes human rights and political correctness in a big way, under our Westminster system of parliamentary democracy.   


Are we as commoners in Australia forced to install NBN?  I know that the Government has given NBN roll out targets, to cover more portions of this Great Southern Land.   I shudder when I see NBN advertisements on the media  - to me it just means NBN is way behind its agreed performance targets.


Strange looking men, contractors hired by NBN,  built an outside NBN box above my existing outside Telstra box   - they do not even talk to you and when approached, say nothing, know nothing and  keep their distance from us.      I heard that NBN has targets to achieve in covering specific  suburbs in their roll out  - and akin to war machines. act in surprising the local populace - and treat human beings with no rights at all in consultation, choice and being informed in a civilised way. 



The contractors sent by NBN to install an outside box broke a chunk of the piping between the existing Telstra box and the new external NBN box.  I phoned NBN and got no follow up.  I saw a contractor hanging outside my house by chance and he said he could do nothing.  He actually asked me to repair it myself....by going to the local Bunnings store.


Letters are sent by and written by NBN  in an unfriendly  manner and language.    I note an irritating feature of telecommunications companies in Australia is to spend huge on a budget of sending snail mail letters - and when I phone up NBN, I am placed on a "circuitous telephone and wait on the line" experience, which says so evidently that NBN does not really want to talk to me and listen to my queries.  


On a side note, Telstra still sends me hard copy letters by traditional post even if I owe them nothing and  I no longer use their services -  this has been going on for more than ten years, easy.   Many people I ask just chuck the hard copy letter they receive from NBN.   Perhaps Telstra has a generous budget to waste on printing and mailing.


After the external NBN box has been set up outside my house, I am barraged by these regular letters stating that the NBN network will replace my landline networks and that I need to get into an NBN plan before a stated due date -  otherwise all my accessible telecommunications will be switched off,  with no other option given to me as an Australian citizen.   NBN spells out that all landline phones, landline internet, EFTPOS and ATM services, fax machines and Teletypewriter devices, monitored security alarm systems, medical alarms and emergency call systems shall be switched off, if the customer does not take up NBN installation.


It is just the sub-standard way in which NBN carries out its installation process and then followed by the lack of delivery of viable service to the customer after installation - this is not on.   Throughout NBN does not communicate sufficiently with the customer.


The preamble promise by NBN in this written letter is that the NBN network is designed  to give Australians "access to fast and reliable landline phone and internet services".
This constantly sent NBN letter promises me four key things, which have not been fulfilled by the NBN post installation:

Faster downloads.


Fewer dropouts.


Better productivity.


A brighter future.

Human Addiction

If they are not organically grown, strawberries are said to carry the most residue of pesticides from commercial growing of vegetables and fruits.

Just reflect on smart devices and their software, looking captivating as well with lures and experiences of convenience, interconnectedness and flexibility. What residues of negative connatations and real risks do these gadgets have?

1. Escalating personal addictiveness. How long does it take to check your smart phone after waking up each day?

2. Allowing others to manipulate and control our desires - and we are not even aware of it. Fake news or a source we trust?

3. Feeling pleasure in building up our dependency on others. There is an App for almost everything, especially for things we did not even think we required.

4. Emphasising unplaced trust. Who reads all the terms and conditions, written in a most unpalatable way?

5. Enhancing runaway loss of privacy. Did you notice how many parties want to know your present location?

6. Submitting to structures much larger than nations and governments. 

7. Increasing the risks of putting all the eggs in one basket. The Cloud, the Cloud!

8. Nurturing the Empire of Self-obsession. The Me culture is evident in most Apps.

To unplug is comparable to abstaining from our fav foods. Previous generations were hooked on television, white goods, motor cars and other inventions. So what is new?

The immediate casualty for an individual in this contemporary period is losing the balance in choices amongst screen time, embracing the outdoors and enhancing physical activity. There are pyschological and physiological benefits in putting away the smart screens for longer periods - and yet there are withdrawal symptoms, pleasure to give up from persuasive tech and an isolation from communication issues to deal with.

Our human brains are increasingly engineered to sync with such smart machines to such an extent each of us undergo feelings of real loss in not constantly interacting with them. We feel better when we get likes. We instinctively want to get biofeedback from our exercises - and this facet of behavioural pyschology has been utilised to higher levels of inducing addiction in each of us. We want to instinctively get rewards on a constant basis - the smart machines and Apps know this very well.

The human race is essentially a social animal - and yet so called smart tech escalates isolation, over self importance and encourages social awkwardness. The art of an enjoyable conversation is lost, replaced by the thrills of software graphics and the ability to do things silently without the need to verbalise or spell - think of Emojis.

Previous inventions freed up time to enable gathetrings of the family or tribe.
Smart machines make us so obsessed we run out of time to eat properly or make time to meet up - after all the message has been delivered to other individuals by a click.

We can be observed to be like guinea pigs riding mini wheels to obtain constant bursts of little cubes of food. The volume of content of so many social media vehicles are endless - not that most have any meaningful value. 

The stakes in today's games are higher than ever, due to the startling degrees of lacking transparency, hidden access to your data and the extreme profiling of individuals. Behind it all is business, the need to make profits and to sell you something - that has never changed!

In summary, the actual ability of smart machines, social media moves and Apps software to change your behaviour is the most significant. Most of us do not even realise this is happening to each of us.

Rare is the person who can utilise the largest opportunities to take advantage of this development.

#yongkevthoughts