A few years back, in India, competition amongst the ISP/Telephone providers were heating up and everything became so cheap and readily available. I got Jio for fun, and then Airtel in hope to stop them from calling/texting/spamming me. Now, I have two additional Internet fibers coming in besides the primary, and they came with free (I think, Unlimited) phone calls. So, I added two wired phones and kept them.
Now, my 2nd daughter (5-ish year old) is intrigue and knows she can talk to her grandparents on the other end. She is brimming with triumph and fun that she knows the "numbers to grandma and grandpa."
Growing up, phones were a luxury and I know the ins-out of the only telephone exchange in our tiny home-town, where I know quite a few top executives (friends' father/uncles). I love the nostalgia of having a wired phone and I want that rotary ones.
“They have phones in booths now? What am I logging this thing around for!?” And throws away their cellphone.
I have a landline that I only use to call my mobile phone, when I lose it within the house.
But if your VDSL signal is coming down the landline then you _are_ using it. At least that's what I told myself to try to feel better about it (FTTP now!)
Incidentally their landlines on fibre are basically VoIP phones with a battery backup.
Same with most other fibre providers, like Vodafone.
I'm sure there are more
But yes, there is still always a landline required and thus has to be priced in somehow.
Now they have deployed full fibre so I could ditch everything and move to that but that would be more expensive...
I keep mine disconnected because all I get on it is spam.
113 (1952) ; Human operator on small island
444303 (1958)
782502 (1966)
1484997 (1978) ; My first personal phone, It was also routed to my cell phone until 2018.
termux-volume music 15
while true; do
termux-tts-speak -l fi 5 5 5 1 2 3 4 5
sleep 1
done
maybe we should bring back phreaking just as a game. is there such a thing as a hacker museum? we could set up a mini exchange, payphones, pbx, conf lines, etc and let kids hack it. and there would be no website; you'd have to connect to the BBS to get information, or join a party line.
One idea that came to mind was a family GMRS license. Cheap and FCC-official for the whole family, but until the spec is modified there might be a tiny distance issue. :-)
We now have an underground fibre to all the homes in our suburb.
US Robotics will always be special to me and nothing to do with robots.
It's not quite unsupported, but you can't sign up for a new copper landline plan unless there is no mobile coverage and no fibre coverage at your property. Otherwise, for anyone who really wants a "landline" you are getting VOIP over fibre or VOIP over mobile broadband.
87% of population have access to the new fibre network, and the old copper network is just redundant and unmantained in most built-up areas. Chorus recent started actively forcing remaining customers off it in some areas.
Personally, I've been without a landline for 10 years, and even my parents got rid of their landline a few years back. It's just cheaper to use a mobile phones instead (and in NZ, mobile phones come with the additional benefit of never receiving spam calls)
Very convenient for stashing away the router though.
One time a bored German soldier threw pieces of wood at the wall and almost got to the radio. My great grandfather told him he had to stop because there was a sick old lady in the house and he did.
My grandmother was just a kid and used to be really scared that the Germans would find the radio and send her parents away to a concentration camp. I guess this is the reason all the tracking and surveillance on the internet was quite scary to her and made her rather wary of using it.
There is already a push to not sell phone lines that support voice, so you just get a line that supports broadband only, getting more people used to voip - but there are so many independent ISPs popping up (now that the by ducting is available to use) that they are chucking full fibre left right and centre.
Will be interesting to see how it plays out regarding emergency calls when it’s fully switched off.
I assume this deprication will probably be cost related but I am curious about the implications on the emergency side of things.
With VoIP, you tend to have your own, plugged-in wall box. Which becomes useless the moment your electricity stops, e.g. in case of natural disasters.
Also, analog telephony just sounds better than digital one. No downsampling happening.
fax is still used at all medical centres, pharmacies, hospitals, etc. would this influence those businesses?
Also, all phone lines these days, wether POTS or VOIP are digitally trunked and switched.
Some spare parts have been out of production for decades. If one of those parts needs replacement, then keeping an exchange running may now need replacing much more than just the broken part, or the technicians may try using parts from other exchanges (the number of landlines is much lower than at peak, so there are spare spares in many exchanges, so to speak). That's an expensive way to maintain a network, obviously.
VoIP infrastructure is more fragile than copper assuming equal hardware age and comparable maintenance regimes, but I assume that the lack of spare parts changes that.
I think my ISP in the UK (BT) offer a fibre package that has battery backup, probably for customers that have medical or emergency devices connected.