It should remind us that the digital future we were promised has been hijacked by corporations who see us not as citizens, but as data streams.
Sadly, oh so true.
At first glance, these stories might seem like quaint nostalgia: rotary dials, curly cords
To be fair, you can have a landline but use it with a handset that offers touch (tone) dialing and is cordless - and also offers caller id display, phonebook etc. Maybe the author is getting a bit poetic. I suspect that pulse dialing would not work any more in some places, although technically you can obtain a rotary dial handset that performs tone dialing i.e. purely for the nostalgic look of the handset.
A few years ago, I decided for nostalgic reasons to purchase a few of the older rotary dial phones for my home. My initial expectation was that I would go to Amazon and purchase a few of the same phone models that were in my family’s home back in the 1970s. But those phones are long gone, never to return again. I spent four or more hours, scouring the web, looking for an authentic rotary dial phone. But nope, they really are gone.
It is possible to buy cheap knock-offs of those old rotary phones. The most authentic looking ones are all black. The ones we had in the 1970s were all white and there were no other color options back then. These modern knock-off antique phones weigh a fraction of what the older phones weighed. The transformer and ringer bells were heavy back then. When you use the new knock-off rotary dialer, the dialing wheel does not roll back smoothly and evenly. It snaps back like a child’s toy phone. I was anticipating real rotary dialing. But after the rotary dialing wheel snaps back, you can hear the beep of a DTMF tone in the ear piece after each digit is dialed. Even the characteristic clicking sound in the earpiece is gone, replaced by a DTMF tone that happens after the wheel returns to its starting position.
I kept both phones that I bought. But they were both somewhat of a disappointment. Both of them connect through voip. Instead of paying $50 per month for a phone line, I pay no monthly fee and only pay $0.02 per minute for calls. We use our cell phones so much that my $15 payment to the voip company a few years ago is still there as a positive balance, still waiting to be spent. You can get a $50 two-line grandstream analog telephone adaptor on Amazon. It plugs in to your router and gives you two analog phone lines, complete with dialtones. You can plug it in to any phone outlet in the house and that will activate all of the other phone outlets in the house. I keep these phones only as an emergency backup phone line. Times change and often we can not go back.
This is very encouraging to read, thanks for posting.
I’m a big landline fan myself, I prefer it even just from a voice quality perspective. Have implemented house wide landlines using analog phones and ATA adapters.
All phone ATAs connect using TLS/SRTP encryption and can dial each other making for a secure family phone network. This could be extended to other trusted parties as well.
The only bummer is that AT&T and spin-off local Bells are letting their copper PSTN infrastructure rot, and they’re jacking up prices on a dwindling customer base as the oldsters die off, putting the business into a financial death spiral.
So I am biased. My parent had a landline but eventually I went off to college, graduated and went to live alone and rent someplace. When renting someplace I had only cell – no landline. Then I just kept renting places forever and never owned a place.
But between and despite such questionable life decisions, I am nevertheless let to thinking that “phones are creepy so get a landline” is an example of a false dichotomy logical fallacy.
Believing that the only two options are 1970 landlines versus mobile computers that stalk the user at every turn, offer no root access, and have no off switch…. is misleading and sad.
Don’t give in.
Yes. A landline still is location tracking, doesn’t offer privacy from being recorded (unless you have a scrambler (secure ???)), and calls allow data tracking (from/to businesses/people).