Quote of the day comes from Stephen Uhler of Sun, who, in his talk at eTel, said:
Cellphones have reduced peoples’ expectation of the phone system to the point where VoIP is now viable.
He’s quite right – it wasn’t that long ago that you would have been very surprised, upset even, if a phone call were just to hang up unexpectedly…
Now, as a friend and I once discussed, there’s a problem. We need a new social convention. When the line drops, who should re-initiate the call? The person who made the call in the first place? The person with the cheapest outgoing charges?
We decided that it was probably the person who was on the move, assuming at least one party was mobile. Because they’re the ones who will know when they’re back in a good coverage area.
Of course, we also realised that in an ideal world the service provider, or the phone, would do this for you.
“Press 1 to have the call reconnect automatically when possible…”
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I don’t think in practice it would work, as if both people press1 they would just get engaged tones / voicemail.
Not if the network, or some clever centralised app, were involved. It could work out when both ends had connectivity, and reconnect them then, possibly initiated by a ‘1’.
If the network weren’t directly involved, then the phones could connect automatically to a conference-call type space identified by the two phone numbers involved. Mmm. I could probably implement that fairly easily on my Asterisk box…