Here in the UK the landline network is being converted to VoIP, branded as “Digital Voice”. This means that landlines will no longer work during power outages, you will have to dial the full number including area code for local calls and, apparently, answering machines will no longer work.
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That article says that it’s been difficult to have your landline turned off in the UK. Fascinating. I know hardly anyone in the USA under the age of 75 who still has their landline.
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Of course they do. If you have a land line phone with a mechanical plunger, you can actuate it like dial pulses to get the same effect if you’re skilled enough.
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I dropped the bundled landline with my cable contract in the UK about 2 years back. Wanted to keep the number so signed up with a SIP provider to maintain it as VOIP at minimal cost - basically just call costs, no monthly. And the only people who phone me on it are my father-in-law - and scammers.
The other neat thing is that I can use the VOIP providers app to make and receive calls both on my laptop and my mobile - which will be very handy when I move to Japan for a year or so in a few months. (local call charges - when calling the UK. Looks like I’m still at home from a caller ID perspective 
)
Got a Grandstream ATA (Analogue Telephony Adapter) so I can still use my cordless BT phones. And yes, pulse dial is still supported - maybe I need me a Bakelite masterpiece?
Or one of these beauties:
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Yeah, I was thinking Half-price sale.
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Get an ups battery for the modem and phone and unless the power outage take out something upstream it should still work.
We help on to our copper land line for quite a while and the functionality during power outages was one of the reasons.
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Given that this was just written, in the middle of the Hollywood strikes, it’s not at all surprising that there was a sudden drop-off of sales, if their primary market was for film and television props. I don’t know if that was intended to reference a longer-term decline in business, but imagine film/television is the primary buyer these days. There can’t be that many buyers interested in actually using them, and collectors or hobbyists converting them into something else have to be a pretty tiny market.
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That’s a limited market for sales of vintage phones, because producers can rent them from prop houses. Phoneco have probably driven themselves out of work by enabling film prop houses to expand their stocks of vintage phones and include the models that they didn’t have before.
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Yeah, the prop houses would be the Hollywood market. I sort of assumed that prop houses would be regularly looking to fill in specific period gaps in their inventory based on the needs of new movies, and the lack of new movies and shows would put an end to that, but so would the prop houses having everything they need at this point…
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I would guess that producers were buying vintage phones for specific productions if the prop houses didn’t have the right models – and then the phones (and anything else bought for the film) would be sold to prop houses after filming was over.
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I often see vintage dial phones which have in some way been converted to modern systems in retro/vintage/antique shops, particularly the ones led by design and interior decorating. They do have a period charm and recall my childhood to me. Still, it must be a small market. Even my parents switched over to push-button digital handsets 20 years ago.
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This is the only one still in my house. I likely bought the retro cloth covered cords from Phoneco 30 years ago.
Plug it in, it will work.
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I have two old(er) phones. The red wallphone is touchtone and works as-is with my VOIP. The black rotary desk phone, which I’ve had for 50 years, uses a small converter from https://www.dialgizmo.com that works great.
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It should; you may have to poke the fiber internet people to see if there’s a code you need to prepend to the number to tall the VoIP system to use a fax compatible codec. (I have to do that with my Ooma, and even then it’s still highly dependant on several factors outside my control as to if it goes through on the first attempt or not.)
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You can add me to that list.
Mom & I found some heavily carved rosewood dragon phones like this back in the late 90s-00s. They were around $100 - $250. Wish we’d got one!
This one, despite damage, is $1750 OBO on ebay!
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I need to look into this. We have a rotary dial phone and BT will soon move that line to VOIP, meaning it will have to be retired unless I can find a way…
My other landline (which does not have a rotary phone attached) is from Virgin Media and they just moved us to VOIP and I dialled a local number without the STD code and it worked. Basically, they provide an adapter widget that you plug the old phone into and the widget plugs into the router. My answerphone also works. I cannot speak for BT - we have yet to hear from them about it.
(Two landlines because two people working from home for two different employers, until retirement. Each of us is so associated with our respective number that we decided to keep both.)
@nixiebunny Well that’s fine if your mobile signal is good, and reliable. Ours is weak and unreliable.
Yeah - I forced Virgin to give me a battery back-up phone. Basically when the router goes out due to a power cut, it still works 'cos it has batteries AND A SIM CARD with my landline number! They will provide these if you swear blind you do not have a cellphone or that you are a person in one of the ‘vulnerable’ categories.
I keep meaning to ask Ofcom (the UK regulator who was captured by an industry that wanted to turn off the copper network) about what happens when the power cut takes out all the local cell masts too. (E.g. storms last year left areas of Scotland with no power for weeks!) No 999 calls for me in those circumstances, I suspect.
ETA THIS!
And THIS!
I’m with you on this Dennis! Maybe I will make that call to Ofcom!
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We have a vintage rotary phone from the 1940s that was rewired to the “modern” plug and play plug back in the '80s. We were able to use it with our landline – more as a novelty than anything, because the Bakelite handset was heavy as hell to hold to your ear for longer than a few minutes – until 2016 when my wife and kids finally made me get a smart phone and stop paying for a landline.
I recently bought a vintage mid-century Ericofon on eBay and an X-Link bluetooth adapter on Amazon that uses my cell phone to allow it to make calls. Again, a fun novelty.
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You’re not wrong about what the situation requires; but it’s hard to pull too hard for the disinterested party when it’s only the in-too-deep interested who go and do things like this:
One of those things where the fact that no sensible person would do it is a statement on the unfortunate limitations of sensible people.
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A local bar/pizza place keeps their phone rotary-only to discourage the employees from tying up the inbound line for pizza orders.
Works brilliantly!
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