A Longing for the Lost Landline

Landlines were in the news in Finland recently as Telia (one of the large carriers) disconnected their last landline subscriber connections a few days ago (Finnish): https://www.telia.fi/telia-yrityksena/medialle/epress?articl...

The closing of Telia landlines was announced a year ago when approx. 6000 subscribers remained nationwide.

Apparently there are still almost 100k consumer landline subscriptions on other carriers, though. The peak was in 1997 with 2.7M total subscribers. (Finland's population is 5.5M).

Most carriers haven't sold new subscriptions in years, and the prices continue increasing on existing plans as subscriptions dwindle - they are nowadays much more expensive than mobile plans (e.g. Elisa English pricing: https://elisa.fi/attachment/content/Elisa_Lankapuhelin_hinna...).

There’s a much more practical problem with landlines going away - VoIP needs external power to work. With PG&E power outages, cell and VoIP service was largely gone. Having a copper line is a safety concern in such situations.

What I miss about the landline is the quality of voice compared to cell phones. The latter always sounded tinny to me. It’s only just now getting better with stuff like FaceTime audio.