Source for this? I find it highly suspect from a technical perspective (1-3 seconds, maybe, but not several minutes) and nothing I can find online even remotely seems legitimate / real.
I’d call a friend, we’d finish talking, then I’d hang up and as a joke he’d leave his phone off the hook. I couldn’t make another phone call until he hung up or some timeout of unknown length passed.
I never determined the timeout, and I haven't had a land line in at least 15 years to experiment with.
This was back in the days when you could tell roughly where someone lived by their phone number - 43x—xxxx was south Edmonton (but not Mill Woods or Riverbend), 2xx-xxxx was Calgary, area codes didn’t matter because the whole province was 403, etc. The phone system is a lot different now - you can port a landline to a cell phone (and vice-versa). The original phone number where that happened has been ported to the cable company and now goes through coax (the equipment that handles it is basically a cable modem with a phone jack).
The world was so very different. Waiting for that 0 to finally work its way around the dial, good grief. Especially since as a kid I was perpetually afraid any phone number that included a 0 might lead me to somehow get connected to a phone operator, so I wanted to dial the following number as quickly as possible.
'tis true - the caller has call release control on the PSTN i.e. the call doesn't end until the caller puts down the phone. There's special handling for e.g. 911 calls so that call release control is given to the callee i.e. the PSAP.
This doesn't work for e.g. SIP because the SIP client is not a dumb slave to the network. If I click end call, even if the network doesn't 'want' to end the call, my phone thinks the call has ended.
Most of the “PSTN” nowadays has a bunch of SIP or other digital stuff in the middle, so this breaks down. Not to mention, this was never possible for mobiles to begin with.
Telcos move slowly.
You're right about mobile networks though - that's a different kettle of fish.
This specific hanging-up behaviour was an artifact of older analog switches and I didn’t think they would emulate it in the software-based SIP switches but according to the comment above it’s still the case.