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Comment by goodside | Hacker News Reader

I think you're overlooking the "on their own" part. The OP isn't lamenting that things are less reliable in general, just that they aren't reliably capable of working offline or on a local network.

Phones are maybe an odd example, but it's somewhat true: Traditional phone systems let you make local calls even if long-distance lines fail, or within a building without leaking data externally. Very few people would ever need (or expect) newer voice/video chat systems to be usable in this way, and they largely aren't.

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heck, POTS line phones can even function with a power loss since they derive their power from the phone line (unless you have a POTS line phone like a cordless where it has to charge a battery and operate a 900mhz connection to the handset.)

As someone who grew up in a town with frequent winter storms that caused power outages, my family's POTS rotary phone was very handy during blackouts.

I was able to use the Windows XP Telnet app to chat and send ZIP files to another person when the Internet was down during the 2011 revolution. Hell, it was even better because only party had to pay the call's cost!

POTS is amazing, and its sad to see it going away :(

I am not sure about now but accordingly to what my friend told me at the end of 90s and in the beginning of 2000s in Russia they would wire whole apartment buildings as a very fast LAN with P2P capabilities. So if you urgently needed to download whatever there was very good chance that your request will not cross boundary of said LAN.

I don't think I've ever heard a fast-busy signal from my cell phone, even once. But it happened lots with landlines when too many people were making local telephone calls. Circuit switched networks kind of suck in a lot of ways. I don't think I would say traditional phone systems were as reliable as modern telephone and data systems.

Wait for a disaster to happen in your area - a time when you'll want your cellphone the most. At which point your cellphone will be... well, a good camera.

And personally, as someone who grew up in the 80's, let me offer up a counter-anecdote: I don't ever recall hearing a "fast-busy tone". There was never a time we couldn't use our land line (at least until we had a modem, that is).

I live in a disaster-prone (wildfire) area. I'll take cellphones over landlines every single time.

1) In the event of a major disaster, you've probably evacuated. You can't take your landline with you.

2) Telephone poles burn.

3) Even if the cellular system is completely hosed, you might still be able to get on a data network. All you need is crappy wifi anywhere (cafe, hotel, friend) and you can get an email out.

I have to admit, I'm not entirely sure why there's so much hate for reliable technologies like landlines. All I can guess is that they stole someone's lunch money. Or people feel the need to justify their cellphone purchases by coming up with specious arguments against the "competition".

1) Not all disasters can be evacuated away from. Tornadoes, for example.

2) So do power poles. And those telephone poles are also probably carrying data.

3) You can't dial 911 via email.

Cell network congestion is a well known phenomenon when disasters strike. It's been seen multiple times in the past. Yes, landlines can and do fail as well, but they're more resilient than cellphone networks.

Perhaps this will flip in the future, but it hasn't, not yet.

1) How's landline infrastructure going to hold up to tornadoes?

2) Yes, power goes out too. Cellphones have batteries.

3) Yes, you can dial 911 via "wifi calling". I've done it.

I don't know about "hate" but I do think landlines are overrated. You already have a cellphone. Paying for an extra service and apparatus for the tiny possibility that you need to call 911 when your cellphone can't - why? Who else are you going to call? Do you even know their phone numbers without your cellphone?

I also think you're undervaluing cellphones by assuming they only talk on the cellular network. You just need to get on a data network somewhere and you suddenly have a wide variety of communication options, including phone calls. TCP/IP was designed to withstand nuclear war.

I grew up in the 80's too. What you say is very very dependent on your service area. I have fantastic coverage where I live, but I live in a big city. I've never had a problem with initiating a call on my mobile. It's likely my operator has done a better job of pico-celling my area than yours has. You might consider switching.

I got fast busy tones several times a year back in the 80's, and it usually corresponded to whenever a concert was announced. Maybe my phone company back then was as bad as your mobile services company is now?

Well, that relies on a couple of things. A disaster can take phone lines out as well as electricity. You might not have zero cell phone service if towers are working. Land lines would get clogged at times and simply fail you (I've had this happen).

You generally have some charge on your phone, though, and lots of folks have power banks now - or cars they can charge their phones with.

Don't forget all the times when disaster strikes and the cell phones are a real help: Car accidents, for example. At one time, you were reliant on you - or someone else - stopping by a house and hoping they'd be home. And I'm sure there are lots of other examples of this as well. Now that laws changed, cell phones can pretty much always call 911 as well, even without service at all: This was not the case with phone lines. If the house didn't have service, you couldn't get help.

In large disasters, cell phone networks have historically become so bogged down that even with fully functional towers and phones, you couldn't use the network. Perhaps sometime we'll have sufficient provisioning of cell phone towers to absorb such large spikes in usage, but we're not there right now.

Crucially, however, there is no profit in getting to the point of being properly provisioned for emergencies, and no regulation pushing for it. Land lines, in contrast, are regulated to push for availability during emergencies.

Yeah, I don't think cell phones do fast-busy. They just timeout dialing without a carrier driven noise (mine have usually made the boop-boop noise like when the other party hangs up). Of course, with a cell phone, you can never tell if it's the network is busy or the tower is out of range, or the tower is broken. With a landline, you can tell if the line is dead (totally disconnected), really broken (voltage on the line, but no dialtone), or just pretty overloaded (dial tone, but fast busy for all numbers). And, if you made a habit of calling very busy numbers (like Netzero dial-ups), you could learn the tricks to get better priority; dialing the first N-1 digits, waiting a few seconds, and then the final digit would get me a waiting modem way better than just auto-redial on busy.

They sure sounded a lot better though.

Lower latency too. It's crazy how much of a difference low latency really makes.

Yes, this 100%. I miss being able to talk to people like they're in the same room, with no detectable latency, the way that local landline calls used to work.

I think most people don't realize why phone calls suck these days; it just feels awkward and cumbersome, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Not with VoLTE and FaceTime Audio around now. Inter-carrier calls can still suck, but I now have noise canceling headphones which enables me to get a much more intelligent signal out of the mouth of the other caller than I could with just the call speaker held up to my ear.

There’s a lot that still sucks, but I don’t miss landlines the slightest bit. Scheduled do not disturb is a godsend next to trying to remember to turn the ringer on the landline in the hallway off at night.

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