Why I’m Nostalgic for Landlines | Hacker News Reader

Why I’m Nostalgic for Landlines

nytimes.com

3 pointsfortran7710 comments

My land line always worked fine during hurricanes when cell phones were useless and electrical power was out. It is also nice to be able to call 911 and get emergency assistance during hurricanes (YMMV depending on local conditions).

Plus with a land line the 911 operator can see the exact address you're calling from.

The death of the landline was laid, when CLI was invented. Before CLI you had to pick up or decide not to know who it was. Once you could screen, it was game over red rover, mobiles just accelerated it and VOIP cut the legs off.

Hrm. Dunno. CLI worked with landlines where I'm from since about 30 years ago? Also ISDN.

the presage of death here, was being able to selectively pick up. Actual need for a line? total. you want to make out-calls. Being able to filter pick up? Breaks the implicit cycle of "if its a call, it must be important"

Took another 20 years to hit. Thats all.

That depended on your phone. You could do that 'selective' thing via a simple LC-display and cursor/menu-keys and give that 'special' number an always busy.

Could be embarassing though, when the other party supressed CLIP and gotcha! :-)

But is that any different today, regardless of 'line-tech'? You can either do that whitelist thing, and deny any other calls, or do blacklisting only in combination with supressing unidentified callers.

Another thing was that most people didn't even know that these options existed at all, and/or their phones didn't have the capability.

Some former national telcos were also slow in offering, and/or charged more money for that. While the upstarts just did it.

IIRC handsets from Panasonic did it all and were most affordable (at the times).

Not claiming this is the "one" -just, as a signal of change, I think CLI began the rot. Really? I cord-cut when I woke up to how few non-spam incalls I got on the landy, which by then was VOIP anyway. Since moving house 7 years ago I was getting it over fibre, but presented as a true DTMF enabled wall-port: ran at the reliability of the volts into the building. Then, that provider stopped and said "we'd rather back this in the IP service we sell you, as VOIP" (hint: it was always VOIP, they just had ATX devices presenting it to me as non-voip) -But dropped the reliability guarantee.

Why bother? Nobody calling, useless in a power outage, Emergency call location, ok there's that, but I am dialling on my mobile if I fall anyway... Yea.. Nah. Over it.

I remember getting caller ID in the late 80's, early 90's. I ported my landline to VOIP several years back and still keep it for "legacy" reasons (my parents and a couple other relatives still call me on it.) All the other calls are either spammers or scammers.

Side tone and no weird jitter/delay that causes me to step on other parties speech were both good things.

We have all this tech and 4k videos but voice audio still for the most part is terrible

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