Their talking this morning on news about large areas have 911 outages. Makes me think about the change the wife put in place just last Tuesday.
We now for the first time in our lives no longer have a hard wired phone in the house. The wife was looking at all the new bundling deals wireless companies are offering decided was time to change.
We are actually coming up on our 45 wedding anniversary. We have had the same phone service provider all these years. Even though we have moved 4 times we have stayed in same service area. Even my first cell phone I got back in 1990 was threw that same provider, my number hasn't changed. Like so many companies the name change as they bought and sold parts of the company. So at some point my cell phone was no longer threw the wire provider but sold to Verizon.
Anyways long story shortened. We now have all our services bundled and provide by Verizon. We still have the same home phone number we have had for last 30 some years. My cell phone number is the same first and only one I've had since 1990.
I have to admit it does unnerve me just a little being totally wireless. We actually could have saved a few dollars more if dropped off the phones here in the house and had that number ring to our cellphones. But I'm that don't work for me..

So anyways I know their are people who are totally wireless. Bot my kids never had what I call hard line in house.

What's the rest the world doing??

Mac

"Never Forget Which Way Is Up!"

just Verizon cell

Closest thing to a hardline these days is if you still have cable or you get internet via fiberoptic. Theres still a few spots that doesnt get cell service where landlines still exist

I though this was about the outages as there been a bunch of providers recently. then I read more carefully


I have a phone line through my internet cable provider it appears like a phone on the wall in the dinning room it goes about 20 feet down to the cable modem in the basement so as some one else pointed out about the closest thing to a hard line these days and I use it more for out than it gets for in calls.

other than that cell phones for everyone , sometimes we have a spare phone that can be activated on anyone's number in the family incase the hardware is what dies.

they are not phone lines any more they are little computers pretending to be phones even most of the what people think are regular phone lines are a little converter that convert voice lines to go over the internet.

my US cellular phone was down Saturday could send txt but not calls.

makes you a believer in "prepare to self rescue"

so the internet is down a lot more than people realize not all of it but if your bit and peice of it

in a lot of cases your phone is only as good as your internet and you get to find out how much that is down when you try to make all phone calls over it.

like back in the day when you called someone told them where you were heading and when you should be back.

this sort of goes along with the do you work alone

so you work alone do you inform anyone of where you are or will or check in at all?

we have gotten so used to the idea that our cell phones work everywhere 100% of the time people don't plan for the failure.

everything fails and the more times they put all the eggs in one basket the more we see these failures effect larger areas and more coms.

pretend it is 1990 again and you should make a plan and check in

Companies are getting away from copper lines. Cost is just too much to maintain plus a few lawsuits about lead even has companies removing it from the ground.
Fiber is the way to go, digital phones or VOIP is common place now.
If your internet is over copper lines then yeah, you’ll have issues.

with VoIP they can compress your sampling rate to get more calls on the same bandwidth
where every copper call was full bandwidth you can now get 3 calls in the place of one.

they also instead of having 100 pair lines that can carry 100 calls , have one fiber that can carry 4096 calls uncompressed. if they multiplex the light spectrum or compress the calls more you make gains on that.
you never lay 1 fiber you lay a lot of fibers in a bundle
one backhoe can take out a LOT of fiber in a second

it is a cost thing but it is very much a proffit thing

also copper was put in with REA rural electrification act money so then it had to be leased to other companies , make enough money on that and lay your own fiber and now you have a monopoly on your area again. pull out the copper and no one can use it to compete in your area without laying their own fiber or leasing one of yours.


fiber for inter carrier runs has been around since the late 80s in use in the ground.
I had an instructor who for a few years in the late 80s early 90s flew a daily trip to inspect the fiber runs at the time fiber splicing was massively expensive and took a really long time.
so if he saw a dozer or track hoe getting any where near the lines as he flew over he radioed it in and they sent a local tech out there to make sure they didn't dig up that fiber.


when a splice dropped from about 500K to 30K with the invention of a splice boot , he was out of a job

Land line here. Them cell phone thingies are just a passing fad.


(Of course my grandfather Teddy said the same thing about the first autos he saw in Portland....."they'll never replace a team of horses and wagon")

No phone line even ran to my house anymore.
Sure wish someone had flown over when I was digging to install a 8”
line for irrigation years ago…….
I guess I could set messages down it via rubber duck

Tossed out land line phones about 3 years ago never got used anymore and only calls that came in on it was junk calls

We cancelled our landline about a year ago. Changing channels is slower but quality is great.

satellite phones will probably be the new "IT" thing in a few years. Theyve been around for decades but the infrastructure to support usage en masse is coming up.

My mom and dad still have the landline.its between 70.00 and 80.00 a month.i told them to switch over to a cellphone and keep the same number only about 20.00 a month.they both have cell phones too.

We gave up on the landline years ago, After we got cell phones nobody ever called the landline anymore.
The cell service here is usually ok, but I live in one of the spotty zones, frustrating at times. Not sure how it is anymore but a landline would usually work unless a line came down in a storm which was rare. Now your cell service can be cut by hackers, emergencies , or the Govt... So a guaranteed signal can't be counted on.

Land line and cell

Bryce

I'm not exactly sure how it all works now? I guess I really haven't been on a true copper phone line for years. We have had fibre optic line for several years. Like I said not sure how that is all split up. We have had Internet out but still had phone?
I'm guessing this new set up will be like or hot spot or my cell cameras. We will be getting a device that plugs in to power. Then I will plug our main line for the in house phones into that. Basically converting cell signal to our in house wired phones.
Best as I understand it

Mac

"Never Forget Which Way Is Up!"

when you have cable internet and phone or fiber internet and phone

it means they give a chunk of bandwidth to the pheon that is dedicated to that service and it hops off the line at the providers location to phone servers , the internet runs through internet servers

I work on the stuff and don't know exactly how each place does it but that is the basics.

The bad thing about a land line through the internet cable (spectrum)
is if the power goes out you are screwed if you have to make
an emergency 911 call.

At least with the old copper lines, they still allowed you
to call out during a power failure/outtage.

Don't currently have, nor will I ever own, a cell phone
as my arthritic fingers don't seem to work on the buttons,
nor can I hear anything on them even with the volume
turned all the way up, plus they are too complicated
for my dementia addled brain to figure out how to operate.

walleyed

so during hurricane Sandy I had a customer on the east coast . had battery backup and generator backup
had traditional commercial lines not voip or supposed to be not voip.

food , water , employees there to take calls as they answer for a lot of services like plumbers , electricians tow trucks

90 minutes after the power in the area went down , the battery backup on the phone company equipment a few blocks down the road went out and that was it , all done. all that prep to be taken out by the next hop.

she was a former Verizon manager , made some calls , yup they are only required to have a 2 hour estimated backup power supply on remote equipment and everything basically goes a few blocks and jumps on fiber so nothing is a real phone line any more.


back to , Prepare to self rescue , help doesn't even know you need them.

Has anyone heard if Starlink is planning on introducing a phone service?

Green
I think some of this phone / internet/ communication things and self rescue . Go back some what to the working alone, being alone in the working alone post.
I grew up when a lot of people where just getting their first phone. Of course there was no 911 either. That started here in the eighties. My sister was not in the very first original hires. She was how ever very early in that new system.
I think people were more aware of how working alone. Traveling alone and have issues would effect them. Closes phone maybe miles away and the help it brought even farther.
My parents did storm watch spotters for the old County Civil Defense. Most all of that was done by CB. When the power went out at the house and base station was down. Mom might sit in one of the cars in driveway use that radio.
Just the way it was.

Mac

"Never Forget Which Way Is Up!"

I still have a landline, but it is only for my businesses and it also has a fax tied to it. I don’t give my personal cell phone number out to tenants or customers. They can call the office on the landline and leave a message.

We got rid of the personal landline probably 20 years ago.

I pay $35 a month to have DSL internet through the phone line but it stinks and I bought other service. I should cancel but for $35 I'm not in any hurry and kinda like having two internet signals.

exactly
you planned ahead , told people where you were going , when you would be back

called in on a schedule.

radios , were a way to get out , you called land lines of places you knew the person might have been to track them down , if they were out doing deliveries you might call 2-3 places and find where they where and an approximate time and guess at 3-4 stops out and get ahead of them to have them call when they got there.

Mass Chaos Soon?

I was talking with a former Nextel tech , you will like this , if you recall Nextel they sponsored nascar and had a unique phone technology that remote workers and fire services loved

besides regular calls

the phones could be networked to work as a push to talk over the data side and a lesser know feature push to talk over private network.
specifically you could set one truck with a Nextel phone and Arial antenna in a high point around your job site , that would work as a repeater to broadcast your message
it used a tiny fraction of the data a call uses now and was nearly instant. no need to dial , ring , connect.

so you would PTT say your audio message and it would play it back to all the phones on that net
Bob bring the loader over to west end I need a fill .
it broadcasts to all the phones on that net a couple seconds later after you let off the PTT
you didn't have any cell signal
and nothing was being recoded or recordable to the wider network.
you could function completely impended. great for work and fire crews bad for the NSA this was shortly post patriot act. aka the nothing patriotic about it act.

so the fed gave a interest free no collateral loan to sprint to buy nextel
sprint was buying buying buying and failing till they got bought

a very useful technology squashed because Nextel had patented it no one could use it till everyone had forgotten about it.

No land line, no cell

Got rid of the landline about 8 years ago. Was paying for something we didn't use and nobody but telemarketers called.

We both have cell phones,,but we still have the same land line we have had here for the past 40 years.I will never get rid of my land line.

killed the land line here not long ago

No land line for 7 or 8 years. Has saved me a pile of cash.