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.