Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Need a Phone At Your Desk?
First time accepted submitter its a trappist! writes "When I started my career back in the early 1990s, everyone had a 'business phone' phone on their desk. The phone was how your co-workers, customers, friends and family got in touch with you during the business day. It had a few features that everyone used — basic calling, transfer, hold, mute, three-way calling (if you could figure it out). This was before personal mobile phones or corporate IM, so the phone was basically the one and only means of real-time communication in the office. Flash forward 20 years. Today I have a smart phone, corporate IM, several flavors of personal IM, the Skype client and several flavors of collaboration software including Google Apps/Docs, GoToMeeting. My wife and daughter call me or text me on the cell phone. My co-workers who are too lazy or passive aggressive to wander into my office use IM. My brother in Iraq uses Skype. I use GoToMeeting and its built-in VoIP with customers. The big black phone sits there gathering dust. I use it for conference calls a few times each month. I'm sure that there are sales people out there who would rather give up a body part than their trusty office phone, but do any of the rest of us need them? Around here, the younger engineers frequently unplug them and stick them in a cabinet to free up desk space. Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Like the OP, we use Skype officially at the company. I have even given my phone to my desk neighbor...
Move sig!
Landlines are tied to a place.
Each will have pros and cons and which on is appropriate for the situation depends on this basic fact.
I am the typewriter. :D and the writers tapped me until I became a conduit to their magical worlds.
I used to be cool. The cool tool that everyone loved.
The young nubile secretaries pushed my buttons
I was the greatest invention since the phone.
And then suddenly, rather gradually... it was over.
Now I sit in a closet collecting dust.
I feel your plight, office phone. I feel it.
Having a phone on your desk can be crucial if you have to pretend you're doing serious work when someone important walks by. Cell phones or IM aren't as convincing, even if you are working.
There's something about text that makes it inherently less efficient than a simple call, and once you start using IM, you tend not to use video or audio.
None of this means you need a phone system, just a phone that uses your cell phone for handling the calls.
In one breath you are labelling people who use IM "passive aggressive" (are they really?) and in the next you seem to be advocating getting rid of the phone for other methods of communication (including IM). That doesn't make much sense at all. Also, why does using IM mean or imply as person is passive aggressive. Do you actually know what passive aggressive is, or is it just a buzzword for you? I ask because if someone were truly passive aggressive they probably wouldn't include you in the IM at all.
Might be a rather specific use-case, but since there are so many telecommuters...I work from home, and I have a Cisco/Tandberg videophone (one of their "personal systems") on my desk. Although I'm practically never at the office, having the video there gives me that much more "presence" at the office than just being a voice (or writing off emails). The quality is much better than just having a webcam and a laptop + being a dedicated device, I never have to fight with whatever video conferencing software there might be. And of course, it has much better speakerphone capabilities than my cellphone.
I have been very happy with it for the last 2 years. Recently, there has been a bit of pressure to start using MS Lync - but the truth is, Lync is mostly still used as a corporate messenger and not for calls. Lync 2013 does provide for more standards-based approach - instead of MS's RTVideo codec, they are actually going to use H.264, so maybe that'll change things. Then again, you can get one of those Lync-aware phones from Polycom and keep using a dedicated phone.
How can you seriously conduct business on a Cell phone ? The quality is awful, h_lf t__ time you o_ly get half the sent__e and have to either guess what was said or ask people to repeat themselves. Having a clear line is much more comfortable when using the phone all day and gives a much better impression. If I get a call from a company using a poor quality mobile I think to myself are they so cheap that they can't afford a proper phone ?
I'm a software engineer - unlike the sales guys I don't have a work mobile phone, just a desk phone.
And it works for when I want to call other internal departments or outside.
Funny that.
I have to sometimes make long calls for my work and I *really* don't want to do it on a tinky winky little mobile phone, its bloody uncomfortable. And if I want to use a speakerphone then i'll need the mobile plugged into the wall anyway so the battery doesn't die halfway through and how is that any more convenient that having a landline with a cable? Also our Cisco deskphones have the entire company phonebook available on them which is very convenient. Their only downside is being IP phones , when the local LAN goes down so do all the phones.
Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Why is it that just because a bunch of younger people have gotten used to a different way of doing things, that somehow makes the way older people do things evil, wrong, out of date, etc.? The office phone is not there so you can twit your friendface and blog the interwebs: It's there for business. It's there for all possible meanings of the phrase "your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." It's there because it won't shit itself when 500 people decide to visit a Youtube video about a cat. It has no dead zones, doesn't need you to take the battery out if you try to load too many apps, or the SD card wiggles loose, etc. It. Just. Works.
Businesses like things that just work. Your cell phone may be cutting edge state of the art, the thing all the cool kids are using and blah blah blah, but businesses care about those kinds of things... said no one. Ever. Businesses care about fixed costs and reliability and your cell phone won't ever have either. Configure one little thing wrong and you could be eating hundreds of dollars in overage fees... and god help you if your battery charge is running low and you're in the middle of an important call.
Land lines: Because they just work, bitches.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Where I work, nobody has a desk phone. Everyone has a smartphone and a laptop. You can switch offices easily, share them if people work at home on alternating days, form impromptu sessions in common areas, etc. My smartphone actually gets used so little that it generally gets left at my desk, as I also carry my personal one. It would be quite easy for many people to do without one completely.
I work with phones for a living at the largest private employer in Philadelphia.
While office phones are clearly on the decline, they ain't dead yet. We have approximately 20k phones, half of which are VoIP and half of which are either POTS or a digital offering from the local carrier. All of them are converting to VoIP, slowly, and in the process I'm watching the attrition that the OP probably expects. It makes sense to get rid of single lines where they're unused and unnecessary.
However, there remains the complex office setup where you have administrative assistants, or a suite front desk, and shared line appearances. Once someone wants to be able to put a call on hold on one phone and pick it up on a different physical phone, they want it to work like the same technology did in the 80s.
Of course it was easier in the 80s, when those phones shared a dedicated physical copper pair that carried nothing but the voice. With digital signaling it's significantly trickier; Broadsoft has a proprietary protocol to handle this, and the IETF specification (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-anil-sipping-bla-04) never left Internet Draft status (which, frankly, is a good thing as it's a very poor protocol).
I don't see that complex setup going away any time soon, as it's a common VIP pattern.
My phone rings so infrequently that when it does it literally scares me.
I work about 45 feet underground and the only cell service available is through a carrier that I won't use. Should my company ever provide me with a cell phone that may change, but I'm not expecting that upgrade any time soon.
I rarely if ever use skype, whether at work, or at home. At work it would not punch through the corporate firewall, and at home I don't have sufficient need to use it to communicate with family or friends as most can reach me via other platforms.
At work I actually have two phones at my desk, one for day to day calls, and another for bridge lines that I need to monitor. Some of the managers around here have 3 phones on their desks to give them that capability for multiple bridge lines, and also to have a line available to contact their managers for issues that need their attention.
The firewall pretty much blocks all forms of VPN, IM and SIP that can't run over http through a proxy. All such traffic is continuously monitored and content which violates corporate policy may subject the employee to disciplinary processes including (and not limited to) termination.
These limitations would be imposed on me if I were using a corporate Laptop or PC at home as well, as I would be required to establish a vpn to work and all my network traffic wold be required to go through that connection.
I suspect that this is not unusual for people who work in the financial and trading sectors. At the very least it is an effort being made by the corporations involved to prevent themselves from being subject to penalties related to insider trading. I also suspect that several companies have even harsher limits on what their employees can do across the internet simply because companies are looking to protect customer and owner assets that may be affected by a variety of black hat hacker attacks as well as reducing the potential for damage caused by disgruntled employees (or former employees.)
Before complaining that this is harsh, and hardly the usual treatment technology users should expect, I have to say that I happen to like where I work, the people I work with, and most of the people I work for. I like most of our customers and most of our stock holders. I can say that this is not unusual in the group I work with, as this is the first company I've worked with where I've had more people leave the group through retirement than through 'better' job offers elsewhere. No, things are not perfect, but on the whole, things are not bad.
You never know...
This looks like a very typical case of having found that you can live without something and then suddenly thinking it has no place in society.
Honestly you can have my desk phone when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. Actually no you can have it when you provide me with a SECOND company mobile... which incidentally won't leave my desk.
I am in the same boat as you in my company. We IM each other when we can't be stuffed walking, email each other to put things on the record, use a mixture of sharepoint and other "collaboration suites" if they can be called that, and everyone has my mobile number.
My mobile number however is issued to those who desperately need to talk to me. You won't find it on my business card. You will not get it if you're a customer, a vendor, or even a contractor working for me for all but the most urgent and important of jobs. This is a method of making space for myself. This is something very important if you work with people who think that every job is urgent and you should be called in at any time.
We do have someone who briefly tried to ditch the company phone. He simply forwarded his company phone to his mobile and unplugged it. Less than a week later he spat the dummy on his little exercise when someone called him at 6pm starting the conversation with: "Oh I was expecting to simply leave you a message, but since you're here..."
First of all, unless the cell phone is being provided by my company I feel no obligation to do any work from it (apart from being available to be reached when I'm on call or in an emergency). So unless they provide the phone or subsidize my wireless bill...they're putting a phone in my desk.
Secondly I work in a hospital. We configure the patient call system and the heart monitors to ring to the assigned nurse's handset phone (which is an extension of the PBX system). So going phone-free would be a hardship to our facility.
We may be trending that way but I don't think that the end of the PBX Office Phone network is nigh
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
As is the rule with "Ask Slashdot", the answer to the question is "no".
The only reliable rule with Slashdot is that people will take their own anecdotes and suddenly think that it will apply to everyone.
Not everyone needs to reach me everywhere. Hence very few people have my smartphone number, and none of those people are customers, vendors, contractors, auditors, or people around the office who have a history of self importance.
If I'm not at my desk it's because I'm either doing something important, I'm in a meeting, or there's some other reason why I would likely not want to talk to you if you rang my mobile right now. It's like having a PA to sort through the low priority shit. If you are important you'll have my number, if not you can leave me a message that I may hear when I get back to my desk.
And no I'm not going to stop and check the caller ID on a phone that rings every 5 minutes while I'm in a meeting. A desk phone gives me space to get my work done.
If my co-workers were in the same timezone that I am in then maybe I wouldn't need it. But I spend my entire morning and evening talking to people in China and Ireland. Skype and the other voip alternatives just don't have the quality needed to sustain an 8 way hour long call.
Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Not remotely. Sure mobile devices are going to take huge swaths of market share from land line phones but it's not hard to find use cases where a land line phone is required, useful or even preferable. Off the top of my head:
1) Managing multiple lines into a company. Could be done with wireless theoretically but much easier with landlines presently
2) Legal/statutory requirements. Particularly for certain industries like financial services there is a requirement to have a landline
3) Mobile phones get lost, land line phones don't.
4) Separation of work from personal life. With a mobile device it is harder to separate the two unless you carry two of them and who wants to do that?
5) Cost - land line phones can be a lot cheaper to own/operate and aren't obsolete after 4 years.
6) Office features including paging, multiple lines, better speaker phones, etc
7) Comfort - land line phones have handsets that are actually designed with the human head in mind
8) Sunken costs - Land line phones are already installed to most buildings in the US and other parts of the world.
9) Reliability - land line phones are FAR more reliable and have better voice quality than mobile devices almost without exception.
10) Users - lots of workers are not techie geeks and find a land line phone a preferable method of communication
11) Many users do not need to move from their desks. Why pay for the extra cost of mobile when it is not needed?
* Except when I worked as a developer on a PBX. Then I had around 8 phones on my desk. I still didn't bother to configure any of them for usage as my office phone...
PBX developer who doesn't actually use the phone for communication purposes. This may explain a few things about my local Xen box ;)
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Advantages:
1. Comfort. A big phone is just more comfortable.
2. Keeping everything separated. Work calls me at work, which means they don't bother me at home.
3. Speaker phone. As said before, speaker option on a mobile is (1) often still a little crappy and (2) drains the batteries, which means you need to plug it into your charger, which is inconvenient because the cable is just too damned short.
4. Name-based speed dial for the whole company. There's probably an app for that on smart phones too, but we have it on the desk phone, and it's very convenient.
5. Money. We already have this infrastructure. It's paid and depreciated. Especially internal calls cost practically nothing.
Disadvantages:
1. No smart phone to play with, i.e. no angry birds
2. My colleagues and business partners cannot reach me 24/7, but I don't call that a disadvantage.
Not true at all. You need a new provider.
Here in Norway pretty much all medium-sized and larger businesses have agreements with a cell phone company that basically means that all company-internal calls are free, as well as all external calls made via cell towers located around their office locations.
I.e. all the calls that you would have used a land line phone for in the old days.
We have of course never had the horrible "cell phone receiver pays" system used in the US, partly because all cell phones have gotten numbers from a couple of separate ranges, never used for land-line phones, so that we always knew if we were calling a fixed or mobile phone.
The last time I bought a cell phone with a contract clause must have been 5+ years ago, it was for one of my kids.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
For all that matters i would be all in favor of dumping Fixed Phones if it means that i can talk to %person% not %persons_desk%
IF I WANT TO TALK TO FURNITURE I WILL TALK TO MY OWN
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
One nice benefit of desk phones I haven't seen posted here:
When you go home at the end of the day, the phone stays on your desk. So, no one calls you. If your cell phone *is* your workphone, they can call you on the way out the door, on the bus, while you're feeding the kids dinner, and all night.
Sometimes it's nice to know work stays in the office, and home is home. You can do that with a cell by turning it off, but I don't know many people who ever do that anymore.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Call quality of cellphones just is not sufficient for business teleconferences. People attending meetings with cellphones are frequently asked to drop rather than wasting many folks' time with "what? could you repeat that"
Cellphones are important too, but they're not quite a replacement for a landline in business.
Skype or other VOIP is fine, as long as you can access it from your location and your company does not forbid it. Many do, since it's trivial and legal to record audio from them unlike a land line telephone (in the US).
As for people not being able to figure out things like 3 way calling.... If I had someone that inept on my team they sure wouldn't be around long. Conference calling is something any elementary school child should be able to master in a few minutes.
If you have to resort to long conference calls on your cell by having it constantly plugged into the USB port on your computer to keep it from running out of power, you might as well use a landline.
I can also have my VOIP desk phone at my office relocated to my home office phone without having to physically move the phone or forward the number so phone calls from my home office phone look like they're coming from my office.
Also, it's crystal clear, loud and doesn't drop.
Why would my employer pay fifty bucks or more for a cell phone when I'm at my desk all day and a desk phone is about five bucks? I'm not taking my work phone home, nor will I use my personal cell phone for work.
Now, does one need a POTS phone at home? Why would you?
Free Martian Whores!
Why would my employer pay fifty bucks or more for a cell phone when I'm at my desk all day and a desk phone is about five bucks? I'm not taking my work phone home, nor will I use my personal cell phone for work.
Now, does one need a POTS phone at home? Why would you?
So they can call you at home when they want to and they don't even have to admit that they needed to call your home phone. I'd say that they make up for the extra cost by being able to find you to do more work.
I guess Europe is a bit different from the US, where International calls are fairly common, at least to European countries. I was surprised how easy it was to call Germany from France via a cell phone. In the US, you need to let your carrier know ahead of time, and generally pay extra. In Europe, apparently it's all bundled.
That said, here's why a cell phone will not replace my desk phone, even though I have both a work and a personal cell phone (never, EVER get roped into having your personal phone subsidized - you will never have actual off-time again):
* Call quality. My desk phone provides rock solid connection with a call quality that is unmatched by any cell phone.
* Head sets. The head sets that are available for desk phones are miles beyond those available for cell phones, both in ergonomics and sound quality.
* International calls. I can call India, Costa Rica and any other company location directly without having to wait for someone to provision that capability on my cell phone.
Desk phones will go away when cell phones can match them in every single of these aspects. Until then, I will fight to have one.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
So it works. VoIP is great and cheap and all, but what do you really use a land line for? I suspect most people will say something along the lines of, when my cell phone is dead, or during a storm when cell service is out, or to call 911 in the middle of the night when someone kicks in your front door, or when your 2 year old is choking. Cell phones are great inventions, but at 2AM when I hear glass shattering I'm not going to want to wait the few seconds it takes to find my cell, unlock it, load the phone app, dial the number, wait for the call to go through, relay my address to the 911 dispatcher, etc. From a land line it takes 2 seconds and the dispatcher has your info on the screen immediately.
Do you still need a desk phone?
I want a desk phone. I want some way to be reached at work and nowhere else.
All that other stuff is good too, for friends and family, but for work-related stuff, desk phone please (and I suppose "work only" ids for IM/Skype/whatever).
I use a land line when I want to comfortably understand the person on the other end. (The world seems to be divided into people who notice that cell phones lose a lot of signal information compared to land lines, and people who don't.)