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by angry-sw-dev 2382 days ago
In 1995 having a domestic phone call, placed on a wired line, drop due to line issues was effectively inconceivable -- it simply would never happen. In 2015 we were in a time when it happened all the time, people simply accepted that voip was often unreliable.

In 2019 the idea of a vehicle around you simply stopping because its driver doesn't know how to handle a situation is extremely rare.

I suspect that by 2039 it will be far more commonplace, shrugged off as just a fact of life that electronic drivers fail on a regular basis and need to pull over and wait either for intervention or conditions to change.

2 comments

True ... I kind of forgot how reliable analogue tone switching were. Someone cut of the wire once in the road. It's like I see more and more cars stuck at the roadside. Atleast in the 90s the drove until they started to smoke.
Is that actually true? My parents had phones around then and they've always had this habit where they say "Hello! HELLO!" At the shortest momentary pause in the conversation.
No, we had calls drop often enough when I was a kid. But we didn't live in a big city, and it wasn't surprising to us when it happened.

It happened about as often as it happens to me with a cellphone when neither party is moving between towers and has decent coverage.

We expect cell drops because of a technology constraint, even in big cities. Likewise, I think the parent poster is right that we'll expect it more once it starts happening more.