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I stayed at my relatives’ house that has a landline recently, and it drove me nuts. Instead of being able to just pull the vibrating phone out of my pocket lik
by earthboundkid 3y ago
I stayed at my relatives’ house that has a landline recently, and it drove me nuts.
Instead of being able to just pull the vibrating phone out of my pocket like a normal person, I had to drop whatever I was doing and walk over to a room where the phone was ringing loudly. It routinely threatened to wake up my sleeping toddler!
Of course, if you miss it, you can’t just send a text back. (They don’t have an answering machine, which is on them, but still, that’s how all phones were until the 70s or 80s).
Then I had to take a message for someone else. Okay, that part was worse than normal because it’s not my house, but the principle is the same: a landline is a location not a person, and whatever person happens to be there has to relay the message to its intended recipient. It’s a bad system. No one wants to talk to a house, they want to talk to a specific person.
It sucks. I already hadn’t used a landline for ten plus years, but it really reminded me of why I abandoned them. The only good thing is the signal clarity, and using a portable phone hurts that too.
- newaccount74 3y agoSince my kids reached school age, I kinda wished we had a landline again. People call all the time to ask if so-and-so is here, or if the kids are home, etc. Since they don't know who is home and who is at work, they'll first text and then call the kids, then me, then my partner, in random order. A land line would be much nicer.
- askiiart 3y agoI'd recommend getting a VoIP landline-like phone. I have an "ooma", and it works great, and is very cheap.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- actionfromafar 3y agoIt's also fun.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- retrac 3y ago> The only good thing is the signal clarity I recently spoke with someone, and the voice came through with sharpness, depth, and almost no distortion. Like you might hear from a good radio over a clear AM radio station. I had headphones in, and I was calling a department of a hospital, where they probably have a POTS landline on the last stretch, with a quality handset. It had been a while since I had heard that. People working from home, often have cheap gear, relayed, where the audio gets compressed and decompressed several times end-to-end. And cell phones still use heavy compression, sometimes. Cheap microphones. The old telephone system was analogue, then later PCM. 3 kHz passband, with generally quite high fidelity within that band. Music sounded like music over the telephone. These days, uncompressed PCM audio in telephony is quite rare. And the lossy codecs used are often quite lossy, designed to delivery understandable speech under adverse conditions. That made sense in the 1980s but it's only 64 kbps to stream PCM for the 3 kHz speech band.