My job involves calling a lot of people, some of whom are listed under outdated phone numbers. Some of the phone numbers are apparently connected to fax machines now.
Why do they sound like that? It’s alarming. They make these bizarre computerized screeching noises. And they seem to keep going indefinitely until I hang up.
I understand it has to do with the radio transmission (??) but why does the caller need to hear this?
In: 5
Faxes are still sent over phone lines, not radio. You are hearing the digital transmission converted to sound by your phones speaker. It sounds harsh because it’s meant to be a strong enough signal for the receiving end to interpret clearly and its sending a rapid series of electrical changes to relay the information. This signal isn’t ever meant to be interpreted by a speaker, so how it sounds has never been a concern.
If you are old enough to have used dial-up internet, its the same type of sound that was emitted by dial-up modems when connecting to the internet. Complete guess on my part, but I think the dial-up modems only emitted the sound so that people would know they were doing something and not get frustrated as nothing happened while the modem connected.
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