255
TIL that tracing phone calls by keeping the phone line open is a totally outdated trope
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
255 points (96.7% liked)
Today I Learned
18361 readers
398 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Only some VOIP calls are routed over the internet. Most calls, while digital, are still routed over the proprietary networks owned & operated by the major telcos.
The internet is a packet switched network, which means data is sent in packets, and it’s possible for packets to end up at their destination out of order. Two packets sent from the same starting point to the destination could theoretically go over completely different routes due to congestion, etc. The destination is responsible for putting the packets back together properly. Packets can also get delayed if other higher priority packets come along. It’s for reasons like these that both voice & video on the internet can occasionally freeze, stutter, etc. Granted the capacity & reliability of the internet has improved greatly over time so these things happen less and less often. But the fact still remains that a packet switched network isn’t optimal for real time communication.
Telephone networks on the other hand are circuit switched networks. When you are talking to somebody on a telephone then there is a dedicated circuit path between you and the other person. Each piece of the path between the two of you has a hard limit of the number of simultaneous calls it can handle, which ensures it always has the capacity to serve your particular call. If a circuit between two points is maxed out then the telephone exchange may try to route your call via a different path, or you may just end up with a busy signal.
Packet switched networks also don’t have those hard limits that circuit switched networks do. So packet switched networks can get overwhelmed (think DoS attacks) which can also lead to outages.
Thanks so much for the detailed clarification.