So Long Voicemail, Give My Regards To the Fax Machine

itwbennett writes: Yes, it was just a matter of time before voicemail, the old office relic, the technology The Guardian's Chitra Ramaswamy called "as pointless as a pigeon with a pager," finally followed the fax machine into obscurity. Last week JPMorgan Chase announced it was turning off voicemail service for tens of thousands of workers (a move that CocaCola made last December). And if Bloomberg's Ramy Inocencio has the numbers right, the cost savings are significant: JPMorgan, for example, will save $3.2 million by cutting voicemail for about 136,000. As great as this sounds, David Lazarus, writing in the LA Times, warns that customer service will suffer.

Comments

Fax Machines gone?

[fallen1]

There are tens of thousands of fax machines and fax systems still in use today because, despite all of our technological advances, the fax machine is still the most secure way of delivering medical and legal documents between locations in a compact time frame.

E-mail? Right out unless you're configured for encryption and getting all the companies you deal with to agree on, utilize, and understand how the encrypt/decrypt works is ... beyond Herculean in scope. In the medical field alone that would require suppliers, doctor's offices, HME/DME companies, hospitals, hospices, quick care/walk-in style facilities, pharmacies, and so on to all have a system that worked easily that everyone agreed on. Of course, that doesn't begin to take into account the MILLIONS of patients that just might want to communicate with you via e-mail.

The legal field is just as bad - judges, courts, lawyers, public defenders, police departments, fire departments, etc, and clients of course.

So, yeah, technology that has supposedly died usually is alive and well and the people who think it has died just work somewhere they don't have to deal with it.

Re:Coming next ... Office desk telephones

[Sique]

As someone who does VoIP for a living: Software VoIP clients work as well as the underlying network allows -- same as with hardware phones like the Cisco Callmanager. Normally the hardware phones are in a special VLAN, often using layer-2-priorizing (class 3 and class 5) to the next switch, and they sending their packes with DiffServ information (e.g. the signalling with AF31, and the payload packets with EF), thus they get threated in priorized queues through the network. Desktop computers on the other hand are mostly in VLANs that either ignore the DiffServ information, or even actively strip them off, and often the software VoIP client isn't installed in a way to even add DiffServ information.

You can totally fuck off the VoIP phones by misconfiguring the switches and routers in your network, no problem, and then their voices sounds as shitty as the software client. And you can install the software client correctly, and threat the VoIP packets accordingly also in the Desktop LAN, and suddenly the voice quality will be as good as with the hardware phones.