Culture Rant

[John Turney]

I still have one because cell service is questionable at best where I live (if you drive up to the top of the hill and hold the phone in just the right direction you might get enough signal to make a call). I wish I could drop it - thay charge a fortune for it now (almost $90 a month!!) and it is not the level of service it used to be. I worked for the phone company when it was just "the phone company" because there was only 1; nothing short of total, biblical scale destruction would stop that phone from working. Now it goes out whenever the local power fails (no longer independantly powered), randomly just doesn't work at all for a day or 2, sometimes works for outgoing calls but fails to ring on incoming, etc...

Here in California, AT&T is trying to get rid of land lines because of the cost. The state won't let them because of the lack of cell service in remote areas and reliability. Our "land line" is now cellular/ VOIP. We still use the same phone, it's just attached to a cellular/VOIP box. It was my wife's business line for years (she's now retired) and most people know it as her number. If it rings, I won't answer it even if I'm right in front of it because it's never for me.

 

[equiprx]

Our "land line" is now cellular/ VOIP.

For the ignorant techno-idiots like me.
What does that mean????

 

[Gliderman8]

For the ignorant techno-idiots like me.
What does that mean????

Voice Over Internet Protocol.
Basically your “landline” is using the internet to make calls instead of the traditional phone lines.

 

[JPSmit]

Nokia phones were indestructible. I had one that I lost. When I went looking for it, I found it on a gravel driveway to a tank farm that I visited. It had been rained on and driven over, but still worked.

Not sure if it was Nokia but a friend was building a building and the cement truck driver came back looking for his phone - they had to scrape up dried concrete to get it but I think it still worked.

 

[equiprx]

Voice Over Internet Protocol.
Basically your “landline” is using the internet to make calls instead of the traditional phone lines.

So if I no longer have a land line I'M SCREWED????

 

[YakkoWarner]

One of my relatives who lives in a major city has a similar setup - her "landline" is actually connected to the internet (she has affordable fiber access in the city) - instead of being connected to a copper wire pair going back to the phone company switchgear, it now just connects to a little box (the VOIP interface) at her location which is connected to the internet (like a wifi router but for physical phones instead). The bad thing is if her internet goes down or power goes off, her landline phone is now a paperweight as well.

I believe my neighborhood is on a larger-scale variation of the same idea. We still have copper wire on the poles going "somewhere", but I expect that it all goes into a larger VOIP device and the calls are converted to datastreams. And nothing is independantly powered anymore, if the power goes off the phones go dead as well which to me was one of the main points to keeping a landline.

 

[mikephillips]

Well, they changed my lane line, which means a hard wired connection rather than an over the air radio type signal, last year. Part of the local service removing wires and replacing them with fiber optic. They could have kept a land line, but was going to double the cost since it wasn't designed for that. So I dropped it, never used it anyway, in favor of my cell phone.

 

[Gliderman8]

So if I no longer have a land line I'M SCREWED????

No, you’re not at a disadvantage. You can still have a phone in your house that will act just like you remember how a landline worked. It just uses the internet to route the calls.
See YakkoWarner post #46 above.