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Comment by alimbada | Hacker News Reader

> It’s not uncommon to have a one bed flat with 2 phone sockets in the living room and 2 phone sockets in the bedroom and a master socket in the technical room. It’s ridiculous.

This sounds a bit farfetched to me. I'm 40+ and lived in the UK all my life. Growing up we only had 1 phone socket in the house for the first few years until my dad got an extension put in upstairs. I've lived in multiple cities since then and no flat or house I've lived in has had more than 1 phone socket including the house I eventually bought and live in now (which is not small by most UK standards).

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I’m a similar age and have also lived in a few houses over the years. I’ve never lived in any place that didn’t have more than one phone socket.

Though I have noticed multiple sockets are less common in really old houses which haven’t seen much modernisation, and less common in really new ones too (since builders expect most people will just use the master socket for broadband and people use mobiles for calls).

Old houses should have 1 extra socket in the master bedroom at the very least, because the master of the house was expected to plug a phone in there, back in the days. (my parents and grandparents all have one).

Incidentally, this is likely to be the furthest room on the furthest floor, so it can be a good place to add a wifi access point for coverage.

Depends on what you class as “old”. Remember that a great many British homes are 50+ years old. You certainly wouldn’t have considered having multiple phones in a house when they were built. So the extra socket was added after it was built.

Adding extension sockets was a very easy job. So easy that many homeowners did it themselves.

So it’s very likely your parents and grandparents bedroom phone wasn’t part of the original wiring.

I’ve lived in two apartments with the setup OP described, and they were both built 2003-2006. But I’ve not had it anywhere else, so it does seem constrained to a specific window of apartment developments

Interesting. Every place I've lived in has been older than that so that makes sense.

It's a setup seen in a lot of new builds flat from the 2000s and 2010s, which is a very large amount of the housing stock in London for flats (There has been so many constructions!).

Yes, the author's assertion here is nonsense. A case of someone with a very small window of experience being certain that what he's seen couldn't possibly be an outlier - must instead be normal for everyone.

The article also has a constant theme of putting people down because of something he doesn't understand. The Helldivers 2 developers are "idiots" because he doesn't understand the reasons for asset duplication in games. Simple daisy-chaining of slave sockets off the master is "incomprehensible", "pointless", "arbitrary" and "a mess"; the person who did the wiring is an "idiot". It all comes across as unfortunately quite arrogant.

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