I have a cordless landline with a ph # I’ve had 20+ yrs. In its time it was a very nice unit - compact, built-in answering machine, with extendable base units. At this point I guess I have it just to have it as it is still associated as my “home” phone with some of my long standing accounts. It is bundled with my Verizon FiOS package and I think my bundled cost is cheaper with the LL included. Back in the day it was my primary # with my early cellphones serving as emergency backup. Eventually flip phones became smart and I set my LL to forward all calls to my mobile. Hard to identify any particular benefit my old LL provides but I don’t see any real downside to holding on to it. Call it nostalgia maybe 
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I have a landline with the same phone number since 1975. I agree with everything you have said. There is a benefit of having a landline and that is when your wireless system isn’t functioning correctly. In my nearly 50 years with my landline I am willing to bet it’s been down less than a half a dozen times. While I have had wireless service for over 25 years in my opinion, because of spot outages, dropped calls and various other issues the overall reliability is not quite as good as my landline. To me the biggest advantage my mobile phone has over my landline is its portability.
The original phone company copper wire is very reliable. The problem is people move their landline phone to the cable company and now your “reliable” landline is on the internet. Bye Bye reliability!
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I kept my “landline” from Comcast because it was included with a bundle. One thing I liked was knowing that in an emergency I could always find that phone to call 911. Especially at night in the bedroom. I don’t take my cell phone to bed. Now I’ve gotten rid of Comcast and lost that phone.
What you said is factual. Original landline service over copper wire is much better than the service for your cell phone.
Original landline service is reliably obsolete.
How do you watch a TV program, find an address, send a web link, send and receive text, save and send a recipe, take and send digital photo, have a video conference, measure how far you walk in a day and set an alarm to take a pill, attend a meeting or wake up, on your 50-year-old telephone?
I haven’t had a no-service notice on my cell phone at home for years and seldom while traveling in the US.
How did you do any of the things you mentioned prior to you getting a cell phone? I am not saying cell phones are no good. They do make many tasks easier and do things that traditional phones do not do. What I am saying is there are, in my opinion, to keep your traditional phone service even if you have a cell phone.
Today’s cell phones and the the communications they provide are vastly superior to a home-based land-line telephone. The ancillary tasks they facilitate and the services they provide are just icing on the cake.
The first time I ever used a telephone it didn’t have a dial or a keypad, you just picked it up and the operator said “number please.” That was 1948. Land-line telephone technology crept along at a snail’s pace for the next 40 years.
In 1963 I worked as a field tech for IBM and received calls on a pager that was the size of a walkie talkie that clipped to my belt. It was a giant step forward but communications with it was a one-way affair, I had to find a telephone to give the dispatcher info from my end.
After cell phone service came into use in the late nineties, I worked as a real estate broker. That job would have been vastly more difficult had not the cell phone been available.
And the audio quality from a modern cell phone is demonstrably superior to anything that comes over the receiver of an analog copper-wire telephone handset.
Your fond memories of the past appear to be coloring your judgement of the merits of the two technologies.
Pros and Cons:
Here in Hawaii we more than you, lose landline serv ice. MY island (the Big Island) has essentually 1 road around most of the island. A tree falling, wind, heavr rain or an accident can easily take down a pole and with it, electric, cable and telephone. Electric is the priority to get back running, then the cable and phone guys can get to work replacing wires. My thought (although I have not looks) is that the cable is higher on the pole as it does not involve as much work or access. Telephone lines can take forever to splice.
There have been cases where over-the-air TV and Internet have gone down simultaneously when weather had taken down a TV translator and power on a mountaintop over on Maui. There is a deep channel between Maui and us so underseas cable is not used to my knowledge.
Since Internet, telephone and cell service are often interconnected and a shared service, you are pretty much at the mercy of the utilities. Recently we have had rolling blackouts due to equipment failures of the power provider and restrictions on water useage due to pumps being out of service. Almost sounds like a 3rd world country right?
Not a problem for me. In an emergency I can rely on myself. Besides having 80,000 gallons of water on property for irrigation or auxiliary use, I have some solar panels and a gas/propane generator. I also use the Internet (if it is still working) for telephone BUT I also am a Ham Radio Opertaor and can use radio transmitters and receivers which run off emergency power to communicate with the world.
So how useful is Ham Radio? Well Hams practice all the time with emergency communications during ‘Field Day’ where they get points in a contest trying to pass information ot others worldwide. Use of emergency power (like solar) gets extra points. Our group used a helium ballon to lift a wire up to use as a vertical antenna. We used two extention ladders to sit vertically and strung a wire between them for a horizontal antenns. Once I worked with a handheld walkietalkie and was able to uplink to an Anik satellite serving Canada and Alaska to demonstate emergency communications. MY Uncle used to bounce radio signals off the moon to people back on earth. All Shuttle Astronauts were Hams and you could sit in a classroom with a small transmitter and talk with Astronauts as they zoomed overhead.
Granted, Ham Radio is not to be used for certain things like buiness, but anyone can get involved if they can pass the test.
Have you ever wondered hos airlines keep in touch as they cross the Atlantic and Pacific? They are not yet using satellites, they use shortwave and you can listen in as they pass information to land-based stations.
RADIO! In fact, that is what WiFi is too.
I lived in AK for 27 years. We had similar problems and overall, cell service was more reliable than anything running through copper wires.
Here’s just one of the problems you run into when stringing wire through miles of wilderness:
A crew was installing electrical service to a remote location and while the crew was preparing to pull the wires tight, a bull moose decided he didn’t like what was going on and got his antlers tangled up in the cable just as the crew started pulling it to installation height. Mr Moose ended up the star of a spectacular high-wire act.
What past are you talking about? I still use my 1970s land-line phone-company phones and love them for their reliability over the past 50 years. I have no use for all the stuff you mentioned to do on digital phones anyway. A phone is for talking. Why complicate my life if it is not necessary? Keep it simple is my goal, to stay stress-free.
The old analog telephones were rock solid. Then came the touch-tone phones. The telephone companies charged a premium fee to have “touch-tone service”. Remember when a landline telephone customer had to purchase a telephone from the telephone company? Other telephones would not work. Worse yet, the telephone company would provide a telephone and charge a monthly fee for that telephone on the phone bill. I have seen articles indicating that customers may still be paying that monthly fee for a telephone and may have been paying the fee for decades. If you are someone who has lived in the same location and has received the same telephone service for years, it may be a good idea to look closely at the monthly bill.
Yes, I remember and still use those phones. They were designed to have plug-in modules so that the phone repairman could unplug a part and replace it in seconds. That includes the cables, the microphone, the speaker, the circuit board, and the ringer. I use the spares that I bought to keep my 3 old phones working after telephones were deregulated, so that customers then had to buy their own crappily-made phones. I doubt those tiny little cell phone spearker and micrcphone “holes” will ever match the sound of the large ones on my old phones.
There are a few downsides to a traditional landline telephone which may or may not also effect other telephone services like VOIP or Cell.
Since they connect to the Cental Office via wire, a pole down between you and them can cut off service. Your area maty be reliable, but here at my location it happens quite a bit. Telephone, power and cable all can be out at the same time.
In older telephone systems, each home was connected to box (a line finder?) that gave those people a dial tone. If too many people picked up the telephone at the same time, there was silence and no outbound dialing (ESS systems may now have eliminated that issue). Earthquakes, lava flows, calls to vote for your favorite singer on those programs could cause this.
Landlines have a strong voltage with them. Ringing voltage can be 90 VAC at 20 cycles (household electrical service is 120 VAC with 60 cycles), so it is quite a shock to touch those wires when the phone rings. Not so with most other services.
Landlines have a finite number of ‘extensions’. Newer phones (after the Carterphone decisiuon) do not have to be rented from the phone company and may not need to exhibit the same drain on the phone company power as before. They still use the same ring voltage but instead of a limit of a fwe telephones on a single wire, you can now have lots more. Yes newer phones are cheaper than telephone company supplied ones, but many come with repalceable parts but those are harder to find than the old phone company parts.
It is VERY EASY to listen in on traditional telephone calls. One can but a ‘butt set’ or just take another telephone and a single capacitor and tap across the incoming telephone wire. The cost is pennies for a capacitor. This still works in 2024 on traditional telephone lines from the phone comany. It is also common that when a disconnect for a residence or company is issued, the service is never completely remove. 15 years ago I had the phone company remove service from my house. They used the same wires at the street to hook up a new neighbor but forgot to remove the connection to my house. If I plug in a phone and dial out, I am making calls on the neighbors account and they are charged if I dial to check the time, in Australia! I could also put a capacitor and telepone across the line and listed to all their calls, including them reciting credit card numbers. Only the President and a few others scramble their calls on traditional telephone service.
Landlines are fixed to your house. You cannot take your phone to another location (like you can with VOIP or Cell) and have it work. To change service on landlines you may have to call the phone company and they may have to visit your location, which can be a detriment. Some may allow you to make changes online.
Traditional service from the phone company is reliable but very expensive when compared to other providers. Addons like call forwarding, voicemail limitations, numbers of extensions, call costs, monthly minimums, long distance are all tremendiously more expensive than some other services like VOIP. As a publically regulated service you pay local, state and federal taxes, you pay so that some people can have rural service or TTY connections, you pay intercarrier fees and so on. For what soem are paying $20 to $30 a month for landline ervice, I pay maybe $4.
Here is what my basic landline would cost monthly from the phone company.
BASIC $21.90
Touch Tone 1.65
Anon call block 1.00
caller ID 7.95
Call Waiting 3.00
Speed dial 2.50
Distinct Ring 6.00
Do Not Disturb 3.00
For the same service I pay 80 cents a month with no calls. Calls for me are about a penny a minute so being on the phone 12 hours a month (720 minutes) would cost me 80 cents plus $7.20 for calls. Some of those calls being to places like London are cheaper than a penny a minute. Fort hat same 80 cents a month I get anon call block, called ID. call waiting, speed dialing, distinct ring, do not disturb and many more including free volicemail, so the above costs for extas are all included.
The cable company offers a flat rate telephone service bundled with internet and if you go awhile and finally decide that is not useful, your threat of just getting rid of the phone part of the service MAY bring the charge for phone service down to a dollar a month justto keep you on their records.
Every service has pros and cons but traditional telephone company supplied service was not cost effective not useable by me.
You are in the minority.
From WAPO:
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, only a quarter of adults in the United States still have landlines and only around 5 percent say they mostly or only rely on them. The largest group of people holding onto their landlines are 65 and older. Meanwhile, more than 70 percent of adults are using wireless phones only.
It’s not even close. My cellphone’s audio frequency response is 120 Hz to 20,000 Hz with Dolby stereo sound. Your 1950s copper wire handset has a audio frequency response of 320 Hz to 3,200 Hz in mono.
It is true that VOIP is high definition audio with an upper range of 7khz or higher. Copper voice frequency is as stated above limited to usually 3.3khz. The use of fiber to the residence can improve that, but not everyone is on fiber.
Copper landline is also prone to bad connections cause by corrosion or lose hardware. The old 500 series phones had to have the mouthpiece removed and rapped on a hard surface to fix ‘compaction’ where the carbon in the mike would give problems) A digital voice signal can be retransmitted automatically if packets are dropped. There si a reason the phone company (Bell at the time) started convering local offices to ESS (Electronic Switching Systems).
As more and more people switch to satellite and cable-supplied internet, the need for hardwire to houses for telephones will be deminished considerably. Even alarm companys have transitioned away from hardwired connections to cell-phone connections. It is easy to disconnect or circumvent hardwired loops for alarms (trust me :-).
In the past the telephone company owned all the plant from the telephoen you used to the copper wires to the central office to the local and then long distance carrier. That dramatically changed when you could choose to buy your own phone, use a different long distance carrier (the early ones were MCI and Sprint) and then could drop hardwired lines completely. Think about all the hardware between your phone and someone overseas. Now think how much of that is eliminated when your call bypasses TPC (The Phone COmpany) and goes through a cable aloing with TV and Internet and perhaps through a company in Canada that supplies your long distance and local calls. Almost all of the traditional phone service completely bypassed. That is the main reason you don’t see payphones anymore. Who needs that when we have cellphones we can use as we go through TSA stations instead of missing a flight because the airport pay phone is fixed in location?
For some the hardwired connection works great but the cost of keeping that system running will just keep getting expensive. We have a building near me where all hardwired connections route through. My calls never touch that building. I can’t imagine what it costs the local phone company to rent the land and supply service to others. It explains the $20 and up monthly costs compared to my 80 cent a month cost. Hardwired phonnes ara dinosaur.
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