6 ms·

Landlines are dying out. But to some, they're a lifeline

35 points by grubbs 3y ago

dghughes 3y ago
Here in SE Canada my 85 year-old uncle has a land line phone and it's been there forever it was there when his mom my grandmother lived there for 65 years. Hurricane Fiona hit my region and all the phones eventually died cellphones, new landline "voip" (I guess?) but not my uncle's phone. It was the old style wired directly to the exchange a few blocks away. I lost power for nearly two weeks he didn't. My home land line is the newer type not the old style so the modem had no power. My cellphone lasted a few days but the cell towers ran out of fuel for the generators. I was completely isolated communication-wise for about a week and a half. If I had the old land line type I would have had a phone.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Yes but except in remote areas or with specific natural features, where you can't get to other people easily, having a phone not cut for days is not critical enough that it justify maintaining a whole parallel infrastructure. You may argue it does, but it's easy to figure out: in my country you can get it in some places, but it's an expensive premium. Very few people do. Which mean they don't value it as much as they say they do. The ones that do usually are the ones that have the need to be able to call health institutions in emergency. Turns out humanity survives very well without a phone, and while I get how it can become a big problem for an individual, on average for the whole society, it doesn't balance out.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  There really shouldn't be a difference between the tower and the exchange, both need power to run and both are going to rely on modern data communication for anything not directly connected to the exchange. Cell phone power side at least makes sense, if you don't have any form of backup or off grid wattage yourself than getting power through the line is reasonably differentiating.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    At least in my country, cell towers are numerous and get an equipment cabinet about the size of a fridge; telephone exchanges are one-per-city and the size of a small office building. Much easier to provide a generator for the latter.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      Yep, this was why as a kid we kept our landline even after we all got cellphones: Old-fashioned landlines were more likely to still work during a power outage.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  That's a really weird loss of service. land lines are the ones that depend on large-scale infrastructure, and go out with any natural disaster. Cellphones should be much more resilient. Anyway, the current solution for emergency communications is satellite. We have nothing more resilient than throwing things up there above the atmosphere.
  - Johnny555 3y ago
    Landlines (at least the old school ones that ran the line all the way back to a big central office, before neighborhood multiplexing devices were so ubiquitous) relied on very centralized infrastructure that was easier to keep running in a disaster, you only needed to keep one building powered to keep the town's landlines up. Sure, long distance service may have gone down when the lines outside the area were disrupted, but you'd still be able to call the fire department or your mom across town. And since that one building was so important, they kept a big generator there with lots of fuel. The cellular network is much more disperse which makes it resilient in some ways (since if the tower closest to you goes down, you can still probably get signal from another tower), but it's harder to keep them all running, and in many cases they rely on long-distance data lines out of the area to stay in service, so even if the cell tower is up and running, without that long distance data connection, you can't make a call.
m463 3y ago
I've noticed a new apartment complex nearby has gbit ethernet included with each apartment (you have to pay them), and you can't put in your own cable/phone/etc
- mrweiner 3y ago
  Yup, my last apartment was like this.
bitwize 3y ago
My parents' "landline" has 5G backhaul now. Landlines are like X11: vanishingly few people know how to maintain them, and nobody wants to anymore.
- jtbayly 3y ago
  I volunteer supporting a school that has several POTS landlines still. But the infrastructure seems to be rotting. We're moving off of them as fast as we can, because they go down all the time now. That never used to be a problem back in the day. Who in the world would have thought that cell phones would ever be more reliable than landlines for emergency systems like the fire alarm?
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > Vanishingly few people know how to maintain them, and nobody wants to anymore. The irony is that a lead-acid battery, a carbon granule microphone and an electromagnetic earpiece represent the simplest technology which I understood as a 7 year old - enough to build my own telephone so friends could talk from the tree house. Even the electromagnetic routers that use pulse dialling are simple enough for a kid to understand. This is now third-world tech that we can't keep up with [0]. The death of fundamental expertise permeates the western "post industrial" world now. People who know how basic stuff works and can maintain it are dying out or giving up. They're being replaced by a generation raised on smartphone apps and wishful thinking. Maybe the demise of Boeing is the template to watch for the next 10 years as more things fall apart under the gross mismanagement by a deluded corporate class. Of course those of us who dabble in things like "physics and engineering" and do stuff like "resilience and planning" are just Luddites and old men who shout at clouds, right? [0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=25 https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=25
fortran77 3y ago
My 91 year old mother can't use her cellphone well, the user interface of even the simplest flip phone confounds her. She forgets to charge it, loses the charger, etc. I don't know what she'd do without a landline. It's already become much less reliable because the NY Telephone company doesn't care about the old copper lines so we switched to sevice over FIOS. If the battery in the main unit fails--and she can't hear the beep that warns that the backup battery needs to be replaced--her phone goes dead.
- oefrha 3y ago
  A cell phone that’s always placed in its charging stand except when in use is indistinguishable from landline. There’s no “forgets to charge it” or “loses the charger”.
  - fortran77 3y ago
    I hope that you never have to take care of an aging parent with dementia.
    - oefrha 3y ago
      I’m just saying if you treat the cell phone like a landline it can work just as well (or badly). Hell, physically attach it to the base with a cord or something. My rural grandmother happens to have a landline and it doesn’t work like 20% of the time because she didn’t hang it up properly.
    - chucksmash 3y ago
      No need to dunk, just explain what you've learned that they have not.
- etc-hosts 3y ago
  Mom is on fixed income. Landline is minimum 105 US a month around here.
- tzs 3y ago
  Maybe something like this [1] cell phone that looks like a traditional landline phone would do? [1] https://www.amazon.com/Opis-Technology-Cellphone-Push-Button-Telephone/dp/B09VHC6YYQ/ https://www.amazon.com/Opis-Technology-Cellphone-Push-Button...
wrp 3y ago
Landlines also have greatly better sound quality. Having a conversation is so much nicer when both ends are on a landline.
throwaway8526 3y ago
The constant attempts/threats/path toward removing landlines can be quite troubling. I know rants are discouraged. So, please don't read the below as overly ranty; it's just an attempt to detail and characterize some concerns, really. If power or internet goes out, wired VOIP phones won't work. Both the power and the internet have way worse reliability than the copper wire telephone where I live in a top 1% part of California. If cell phone service goes out (or if cell phone batteries get exhausted and can't be recharged), then mobile phones won't work. A landline is a very, very reasonable "emergency line" or even "regular line". The data and power connection to it will not be unexpectedly severed, for the most part. I can very easily imagine an "extended outage" for whatever reason of power, internet, and/or mobile phone service, take your pick. In any of these cases, I would expect to basically be able to use the landline phone to call a relative, friend or co-worker pretty much anywhere in the world. Ok, maybe some disasters take out copper wire telephones, or maybe sometimes copper wire telephones have issues (rare but possible), but this is still a pretty good backup/emergency/constant connection. If you really have got your sh* together, you have a landline, IMO. There is a copper contact running all the way to some box, and to some substation, which has utility-managed diesel backup generators and switching and all that jazz. I don't care if it's digital and so forth behind the scenes. It's managed! It works from their system to mine, end of story. We have a residential elevator. It has a phone line for emergencies, like if you get stuck in the elevator by yourself. That goes to a copper wire telephone wire. I do NOT want to rely on the unreliable California power utility to not have a scheduled or unscheduled outage, causing the elevator fail, and also shutting off power to a cable box powering some VOIP service. Really? Sure, I could add backup batteries. Sure, I could add automatic diesel power generators. But, the phone company already has those! Do I need a secondary and/or tertiary ISP as backup as well, and somehow join them together? (Some will say, "yes, of course".) What are they going to do next, ban standard incandescent light bulbs? Oh, wait, they already did that! Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison must be spinning in their graves! I get the idea is to cut costs or something, but I think this is a safety issue, no? If we can't have real light bulbs, and we can't have real telephones lines, is there a name for that? We used to have more or less "additive" technologies. A new one would go add to the list of available technologies, not really fully replacing any. Just adding to the list of what you can readily have/do. But this concept of "removing" solid technologies for arguably "worse" ones--I think it's not merely enshittification. This seems like a whole 'nother branch of weird. Maybe there's some state that will reverse some of this stuff; one can hope, can't one? If you use one or more copper lines: what is your plan for the post-telephone-line world, if it comes to it?

35 points by grubbs 3y ago

Here in SE Canada my 85 year-old uncle has a land line phone and it's been there forever it was there when his mom my grandmother lived there for 65 years. Hurricane Fiona hit my region and all the phones eventually died cellphones, new landline "voip" (I guess?) but not my uncle's phone. It was the old style wired directly to the exchange a few blocks away. I lost power for nearly two weeks he didn't. My home land line is the newer type not the old style so the modem had no power. My cellphone lasted a few days but the cell towers ran out of fuel for the generators. I was completely isolated communication-wise for about a week and a half. If I had the old land line type I would have had a phone.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Yes but except in remote areas or with specific natural features, where you can't get to other people easily, having a phone not cut for days is not critical enough that it justify maintaining a whole parallel infrastructure. You may argue it does, but it's easy to figure out: in my country you can get it in some places, but it's an expensive premium. Very few people do. Which mean they don't value it as much as they say they do. The ones that do usually are the ones that have the need to be able to call health institutions in emergency. Turns out humanity survives very well without a phone, and while I get how it can become a big problem for an individual, on average for the whole society, it doesn't balance out.
zamadatix 3y ago
There really shouldn't be a difference between the tower and the exchange, both need power to run and both are going to rely on modern data communication for anything not directly connected to the exchange. Cell phone power side at least makes sense, if you don't have any form of backup or off grid wattage yourself than getting power through the line is reasonably differentiating.
- michaelt 3y ago
  At least in my country, cell towers are numerous and get an equipment cabinet about the size of a fridge; telephone exchanges are one-per-city and the size of a small office building. Much easier to provide a generator for the latter.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    Yep, this was why as a kid we kept our landline even after we all got cellphones: Old-fashioned landlines were more likely to still work during a power outage.
marcosdumay 3y ago
That's a really weird loss of service. land lines are the ones that depend on large-scale infrastructure, and go out with any natural disaster. Cellphones should be much more resilient. Anyway, the current solution for emergency communications is satellite. We have nothing more resilient than throwing things up there above the atmosphere.
- Johnny555 3y ago
  Landlines (at least the old school ones that ran the line all the way back to a big central office, before neighborhood multiplexing devices were so ubiquitous) relied on very centralized infrastructure that was easier to keep running in a disaster, you only needed to keep one building powered to keep the town's landlines up. Sure, long distance service may have gone down when the lines outside the area were disrupted, but you'd still be able to call the fire department or your mom across town. And since that one building was so important, they kept a big generator there with lots of fuel. The cellular network is much more disperse which makes it resilient in some ways (since if the tower closest to you goes down, you can still probably get signal from another tower), but it's harder to keep them all running, and in many cases they rely on long-distance data lines out of the area to stay in service, so even if the cell tower is up and running, without that long distance data connection, you can't make a call.

m463 3y ago

I've noticed a new apartment complex nearby has gbit ethernet included with each apartment (you have to pay them), and you can't put in your own cable/phone/etc

mrweiner 3y ago
Yup, my last apartment was like this.

bitwize 3y ago

My parents' "landline" has 5G backhaul now. Landlines are like X11: vanishingly few people know how to maintain them, and nobody wants to anymore.

jtbayly 3y ago
I volunteer supporting a school that has several POTS landlines still. But the infrastructure seems to be rotting. We're moving off of them as fast as we can, because they go down all the time now. That never used to be a problem back in the day. Who in the world would have thought that cell phones would ever be more reliable than landlines for emergency systems like the fire alarm?
nonrandomstring 3y ago
> Vanishingly few people know how to maintain them, and nobody wants to anymore. The irony is that a lead-acid battery, a carbon granule microphone and an electromagnetic earpiece represent the simplest technology which I understood as a 7 year old - enough to build my own telephone so friends could talk from the tree house. Even the electromagnetic routers that use pulse dialling are simple enough for a kid to understand. This is now third-world tech that we can't keep up with [0]. The death of fundamental expertise permeates the western "post industrial" world now. People who know how basic stuff works and can maintain it are dying out or giving up. They're being replaced by a generation raised on smartphone apps and wishful thinking. Maybe the demise of Boeing is the template to watch for the next 10 years as more things fall apart under the gross mismanagement by a deluded corporate class. Of course those of us who dabble in things like "physics and engineering" and do stuff like "resilience and planning" are just Luddites and old men who shout at clouds, right? [0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=25 https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=25

fortran77 3y ago

My 91 year old mother can't use her cellphone well, the user interface of even the simplest flip phone confounds her. She forgets to charge it, loses the charger, etc. I don't know what she'd do without a landline. It's already become much less reliable because the NY Telephone company doesn't care about the old copper lines so we switched to sevice over FIOS. If the battery in the main unit fails--and she can't hear the beep that warns that the backup battery needs to be replaced--her phone goes dead.

oefrha 3y ago
A cell phone that’s always placed in its charging stand except when in use is indistinguishable from landline. There’s no “forgets to charge it” or “loses the charger”.
- fortran77 3y ago
  I hope that you never have to take care of an aging parent with dementia.
  - oefrha 3y ago
    I’m just saying if you treat the cell phone like a landline it can work just as well (or badly). Hell, physically attach it to the base with a cord or something. My rural grandmother happens to have a landline and it doesn’t work like 20% of the time because she didn’t hang it up properly.
  - chucksmash 3y ago
    No need to dunk, just explain what you've learned that they have not.
etc-hosts 3y ago
Mom is on fixed income. Landline is minimum 105 US a month around here.
tzs 3y ago
Maybe something like this [1] cell phone that looks like a traditional landline phone would do? [1] https://www.amazon.com/Opis-Technology-Cellphone-Push-Button-Telephone/dp/B09VHC6YYQ/ https://www.amazon.com/Opis-Technology-Cellphone-Push-Button...

wrp 3y ago

Landlines also have greatly better sound quality. Having a conversation is so much nicer when both ends are on a landline.

throwaway8526 3y ago

The constant attempts/threats/path toward removing landlines can be quite troubling. I know rants are discouraged. So, please don't read the below as overly ranty; it's just an attempt to detail and characterize some concerns, really. If power or internet goes out, wired VOIP phones won't work. Both the power and the internet have way worse reliability than the copper wire telephone where I live in a top 1% part of California. If cell phone service goes out (or if cell phone batteries get exhausted and can't be recharged), then mobile phones won't work. A landline is a very, very reasonable "emergency line" or even "regular line". The data and power connection to it will not be unexpectedly severed, for the most part. I can very easily imagine an "extended outage" for whatever reason of power, internet, and/or mobile phone service, take your pick. In any of these cases, I would expect to basically be able to use the landline phone to call a relative, friend or co-worker pretty much anywhere in the world. Ok, maybe some disasters take out copper wire telephones, or maybe sometimes copper wire telephones have issues (rare but possible), but this is still a pretty good backup/emergency/constant connection. If you really have got your sh* together, you have a landline, IMO. There is a copper contact running all the way to some box, and to some substation, which has utility-managed diesel backup generators and switching and all that jazz. I don't care if it's digital and so forth behind the scenes. It's managed! It works from their system to mine, end of story. We have a residential elevator. It has a phone line for emergencies, like if you get stuck in the elevator by yourself. That goes to a copper wire telephone wire. I do NOT want to rely on the unreliable California power utility to not have a scheduled or unscheduled outage, causing the elevator fail, and also shutting off power to a cable box powering some VOIP service. Really? Sure, I could add backup batteries. Sure, I could add automatic diesel power generators. But, the phone company already has those! Do I need a secondary and/or tertiary ISP as backup as well, and somehow join them together? (Some will say, "yes, of course".) What are they going to do next, ban standard incandescent light bulbs? Oh, wait, they already did that! Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison must be spinning in their graves! I get the idea is to cut costs or something, but I think this is a safety issue, no? If we can't have real light bulbs, and we can't have real telephones lines, is there a name for that? We used to have more or less "additive" technologies. A new one would go add to the list of available technologies, not really fully replacing any. Just adding to the list of what you can readily have/do. But this concept of "removing" solid technologies for arguably "worse" ones--I think it's not merely enshittification. This seems like a whole 'nother branch of weird. Maybe there's some state that will reverse some of this stuff; one can hope, can't one? If you use one or more copper lines: what is your plan for the post-telephone-line world, if it comes to it?