Pitching the Landline

 

Imagine trying to pitch the idea of a landline phone to a telecoms executive in today’s world where the smartphone is ubiquitous and nigh on indispensable for many people.

“What’s the screen size?”
“There’s no screen.”

“So how do you use the camera?”
“There’s no camera.”

“But it’s got Bluetooth, right?”
“No, no Bluetooth.”

“Is it Android or iOS?”
“There’s no operating system.”

“What’s the battery life?”
“There’s no battery, you have to plug it into the wall.”

“Okay, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Nonetheless, even today the landline phone is essential for many people. People who don’t want, can’t afford, or couldn’t use a mobile phone or the internet; people who live in areas where broadband is slow or mobile signals unreliable. For those people, a landline phone is an essential, so they may have been somewhat perturbed to have heard that from 2025, BT OpenReach, who are responsible for our phone and Internet cables, will be phasing out the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) on which our landline network operates.

This does not mean the imminent demise of the landline. Instead of the old copper wiring that connected us through PSTN, landlines will instead use our internet connection and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) which is how we currently make phone calls using apps like WhatsApp and Messenger. Which is all fine and dandy unless you are one of the million or so UK households currently without an internet connection. While some may simply have chosen not to subscribe to broadband, telephone subscribers in hard to reach areas will hope that the government’s £5 billion Project Gigabit plan to level up broadband access where they live will be completed by the time PSTN is switched off. Ingeniously, there are plans to connect households with fibre optic cables in the water mains, a system already in use in Spain.

 Unsurprisingly, the use of landlines has plummeted in recent years. In 2012, people in the UK made a total of 103 billion minutes of landline calls, but in 2017 that was down to 54 billion. While there are still about 22million landlines in the UK, that is down 15% from the start of the 21^st century, when 95% of homes had one. In the last three years 1.41 million lines have been ditched.

There are times when Val and I have considered getting rid of our landline. We no longer need it for our broadband, and when it rings – which is rarely - 9 times out of 10 it’s a scam call. Just about the only reasons we keep it on are that cancelling it won’t actually save us any money and there are a few times when we get genuine calls. Yes, we could tell callers to use our mobiles, but there’s something of an overhead in working out who only has our landline number if we want to be proactive about that.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have a phone – I think I must have been thirteen or fourteen when my parents got one - and even then I seem to recall there was a waiting list, so it took about six months between applying for one and having it installed. The one we had looked very much like this:

It rang only rarely as we knew very few other people who had a phone; mostly it was used by my Mum phoning her Mum. Prior to our having the phone connected, my Mum would have to walk about half a mile to the nearest phone box. In an emergency I guess we could have asked a neighbour who had a phone. Theirs was a party line, not something that has even existed since the mid-1980s but which was common years ago. It seems odd now that a phone line shared by two separate households would even be considered and one imagines that a few family secrets were revealed when one subscriber overheard another’s conversation. Which reminds me that crossed lines were another peculiarity of telephone conversations back in the day. In the middle of a conversation, you might hear another voice or voices, prompting someone to cry, “Can you get off the line please!”

Even accounting for the landline’s decline, the language that is associated with it lives on, and will likely continue to do so for years to come. Despite possibly never having used a rotary dial phone, people still dial numbers; despite being able to terminate calls simply by pressing a button, we still hang up. One thing that we do lack however, is the satisfaction that comes with slamming the receiver into its cradle at the end of an angry or frustrating conversation.

 What we don’t miss however, is the frustration of having to stay indoors and wait patiently (or impatiently) for someone to ring you back. And somehow they always seemed to choose to call in the couple of minutes when you’d popped to the loo. Oh, and the aggravation of being in another room when the phone rang, dashing to pick up and hearing the dialling tone when you put the receiver to your ear! When we first got a phone it lived in the lounge, so absolutely no privacy when taking a call. Later, after we moved, it was in the hall, which, lacking any heating, was absolutely freezing in winter; still, it kept costs down as no one spent longer on calls than was necessary.

 No one misses the irritation of misdialling the ninth or tenth digit of an eleven digit number, or being interrupted and losing track halfway through. “Sorry, wrong number,” is something that one hears very infrequently these days but which was a regular occurrence with rotary dial phones when there was no way of checking what you’d actually dialled.

 And since rotary dial phones had no memory to store numbers or calls, each redial meant actually redialling, not just pressing one button, and every number had to be looked up in a phone book, or dredged up from memory. The funny thing is though, I can still remember some phone numbers that I called regularly thirty or more years ago, but I have no idea of the mobile numbers of some family members today.

 One day the landline will probably be gone and forgotten, much in the same way as the candlestick telephone and having to ask the operator to connect your call, but probably only those who currently have to rely on it will lament its passing.