Old school landline telephones.

[amcnj]

My mother still has a landline (and only a landline). The number has been the same since sometime in the 1950’s. I am not sure what year they started phone service as it was before my time!

 

[_19disnA]

Still have a home phone/land line and we have no intention to get rid of it. We give our cell phone # to people we actually want to have it (friends/relatives/neighbors/doctor/dentist/etc.) Never answer the home phone since only scammers seem to be left calling it. Also works great when shopping online since some sites want a phone #, so we give the land line we never answer. There isn't any reason for them to call us and if there is a question about an order, they always use email instead. Any text we get from scammers with a question about something they claim we have 'ordered' is bogus, since you can't text to a land line.

My life also doesn't revolve around using my cell phone as some others have previously mentioned. We call that clever marketing when cell phone providers make it seem you are somehow 'old fashioned' or 'behind the times' if you don't run your life using their amazing device....................LOL.

 

[slo]

No - we cancelled our landline about 3 or 4 years ago and I’ve never regretted it. When we started giving our cell # out and never giving our home # out, I knew it was time to cancel it.

 

[sam_gordon]

Let's keep in mind, that most (especially home) "landlines" are NOT the good old fashioned POTS lines most of us grew up with. They are really VoIP (voice over IP) lines, especially if they are bundled with your internet. If you lose internet, you lose home phone service. Yes, they are still a secondary means of communications separate from cellular, but not as infallible as POTS lines used to be.

 

[kdonnel]

Let's keep in mind, that most (especially home) "landlines" are NOT the good old fashioned POTS lines most of us grew up with. They are really VoIP (voice over IP) lines, especially if they are bundled with your internet. If you lose internet, you lose home phone service. Yes, they are still a secondary means of communications separate from cellular, but not as infallible as POTS lines used to be.

To add to that, POTS isn't always a copper pair from the central office all the way to your house. Often times there is fiber integrated into the loop and/or some multiplexing occurring that requires power to the electronics involved. If the phone company hasn't maintained the batteries at the remote site or doesn't have enough generators to recharge the batteries during a prolonged outage, or just can't physically access the remote site due to the ongoing natural disaster, your POTS phone will also cease to function.

The budget for proactive maintenance went to near $0 a year back in 2005. The outside plant has to be in terrible shape in 2026 after 25 years of neglect.

 

[fly girl]

We still have a landline. And it is separate from our internet which came in very handy when I had my lawn aerated and the machine cut the fiberoptic cord Altafiber barely put in the ground.

We keep the landline for dh's work. And I think the sound quality is so much better on a traditional phone versus cell.

 

[_19disnA]

We keep the landline for dh's work. And I think the sound quality is so much better on a traditional phone versus cell.

I agree about the sound quality. A few years ago at work we switched the desk phones to VOIP and it was obvious the quality was NOT anywhere near as good along with a slight delay where you have to be careful you aren't talking over the other person.

 

[Miffy]

We have what many people on this thread are calling a landline, but, actually, it's VOIP--voice over internet protocol. So when we lose electricity we also lose the not-really-a-landline phone.

That was the one great advantage of a real wired landline phone--it's not dependent on electrical service. But it became a ridiculous expense 15 or 20 years ago. Our VOIP service is Ooma, and it's maybe $5/month, so not a ridiculous expense. I'd get rid of it but DH still likes it, so we still have it.

 

[tvguy]

Let's keep in mind, that most (especially home) "landlines" are NOT the good old fashioned POTS lines most of us grew up with. They are really VoIP (voice over IP) lines, especially if they are bundled with your internet. If you lose internet, you lose home phone service. Yes, they are still a secondary means of communications separate from cellular, but not as infallible as POTS lines used to be.

Mine is good old fashioned POTS. Lord, VoIP phones. We got those at work before I retired. The audio quality was AWFUL. VoIP companies are very similar to solar companies, many small companies that go belly up so nobody to support your system. My son worked for an IT company and the owner just got to the point they would not longer work on them. The software companies also often go belly up, and the systems never provided what was advertised.

 

[tvguy]

To add to that, POTS isn't always a copper pair from the central office all the way to your house. Often times there is fiber integrated into the loop and/or some multiplexing occurring that requires power to the electronics involved. If the phone company hasn't maintained the batteries at the remote site or doesn't have enough generators to recharge the batteries during a prolonged outage, or just can't physically access the remote site due to the ongoing natural disaster, your POTS phone will also cease to function.

The budget for proactive maintenance went to near $0 a year back in 2005. The outside plant has to be in terrible shape in 2026 after 25 years of neglect.

The central office upkeep costs are why I think A.T.&T wants to end landlines. Their central offices here are all set up so that they are always running off those batteries so there is no interruption of service if the shore power goes down. The batteries can run the system without recharging for a week, the diesel generators have a months worth of fuel on site. I got to tour a central office and the key word there is redundancy. Everything has more than one backup.
Absolutely, the infrastructure is a mix of copper, fiber, etc. All that stuff the A. T.&T has buried in the street is going to be maintained. I bet they make a ton of money leasing access to those systems to all the internet and data providers who could never afford to install their own infrastructure, not that many cities. would even allow them to do all the digging necessary.
One interesting situation came up 10 months ago when I had the siding replaced on my house. The siding contractor called me out and pointed to the "Bell System" junction box and asked if that was important or could they take the box off and cover it up with siding. He seemed shocked that I had a landline, and that my fiber internet used that junction box to connect beyond my house.
And anytime any digging needs to be done they always mark the cable coax that they buried in my lawn when I got cable tv in 1987. It isn't even connected to the house anymore, and hasn't been used in 26 years when I put a satellite system in.

 

[AnnaS]

Not connected to the internet and if we lose power, I still have one that I can use - the other 3 are cordless/not good of course.

 

[kdonnel]

Their central offices here are all set up so that they are always running off those batteries so there is no interruption of service if the shore power goes down.

In my prior job our company provided various telephone companies, including what was once Pacific Bell with a proactive maintenance system for SLC systems. There were back in 2005, millions of phone lines running on SLC systems in California which would require power beyond what is provided by the CO to operate.

 

[Lumpy1106]

We still have our land line. It's the same bill as our WiFi so I don't think we pay all that much to have the phone line. I almost never use it.

Funny story;
Just came back from a LAX tournament with my 12 year old. She picked up the receiver on the desk phone in the hotel room and wanted to know what the buzzing noise was.

 

[tvguy]

In my prior job our company provided various telephone companies, including what was once Pacific Bell with a proactive maintenance system for SLC systems. There were back in 2005, millions of phone lines running on SLC systems in California which would require power beyond what is provided by the CO to operate.

What I toured was in extreme Northern California, prior to 1998. They may a big deal of their system being able to operate without outside power for a month.

 

[SeeYouAtBoma]

We still have our land line. It's the same bill as our WiFi so I don't think we pay all that much to have the phone line. I almost never use it.

Funny story;
Just came back from a LAX tournament with my 12 year old. She picked up the receiver on the desk phone in the hotel room and wanted to know what the buzzing noise was.

This reminds me of all the blank stares I've received when I try to explain to someone that I didn't get their text message because the phone does not get text messages. The other party often either doesn't get it or pretends that they don't get it.

Them: "You didn't answer my text!"
Me: "I have a landline, I can't receive text messages."
Them: "OK, but you didn't answer my text."
Me:

 

[wabbott]

A discussion about progress (or is it?) of human communications technology. Makes me want to go for a ride on Spaceship Earth. I like the story of papyrus.

according to Mr. AI: Papyrus was a versatile plant essential to the Egyptian Empire, used to create the world's first portable writing surface (papyrus paper), replacing heavier materials for records, literature, and art, alongside other products like boats, sandals, and mats, while also symbolizing creation and the fertile Nile delta. Developed by the 3rd millennium BCE (c. 2900 BCE), its lightweight, flexible sheets enabled widespread administration, knowledge preservation, and detailed religious or scientific texts, becoming a foundation for Egyptian intellectual and economic power.

 

[Travel60]

Our seasonal home is in an area with bad cell service** - we literally have to "walk up the hill" to get it. Our security company told us we had to have a land line. We first bought a set of the cordless phones but then realized that they all rely on electric power. After a few storms, we added an old-fashioned corded princess phone that doesn't need power.
**Starlink has since come in and some of my neighbors have it - say it's great. But I'm not giving them my money.

But, back on the topic, I recently heard that a lot of young families who have never had a land line are having one install so their pre-teen children have a way to talk to friends without a cell phone.

 

[robinb]

Yes and no. We still have our landline number, but the service is VOIP.

 

[disykat]

We also still have our landline number, but it is through our internet provider. I won't give it up easily. I've managed to keep my cell phone number pretty protected. Another "dinosaur" that we also still have is our old internet provider email, though everything we need reliably has been switched. It's not AOL, but it might as well be! Giving up that email address has been the hardest thing.

 

[tvguy]

My preference for using a landline goes back to the reason I got a cell phone in the first place. I worked graveyard shift for 25 years and slept 9 am to 5 pm. The cell phone was purchased so I could tell everyone they could call me on my landline while I was asleep and leave a message without worrying about waking me because the ringer was off and the volume on the answering machine turned down. My bosses knew they could call without waking me up, and that I would call them back when I got up at 5 pm if they needed to speak with me. The cell phone was the phone that was left on while I slept so my wife, kids, and elderly mother could get ahold of me in an emergency. My bosses knew where my wife worked, and if they absolutely needed to talk to me right now, they could call her and she would call me on the cell phone and wake me up. So I grew to appreciate having a public phone number, and private one and THAT is why it is worth it to keep a landline for me.
Funny thing is, I ALMOST got another landline instead of the cell phone, but the ability to use the cell phone in the car made it a better choice. Not sure I could even easily added another landline as I already had two counting the one for my dial up computer service. My neighbor to the east worked at home and paid to have 12 landlines installed in his house (this was in the 1990s) and it was .expensive, so it could be done. The current owner of the house......(4 other people owned the house after the guy put all those landlines in) did ask why there were so many landlines wired up. Funny thing is, both he and his wife work from home with no landlines, just an internet connection. Times change. Although I was surprised when we had a power outage during covid that they had no battery backup so they were down for the 2 hours the power was out. I was working from home for 15 months and my employer issued me a laptop and a MiFi device so I was up and running even without power.