When you visit Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, you may be told about his telephone. It was one of the first phones in the country, so he could neither call nor be called. He had faith in a phone-ful future. Also, he had invested in AT&T. Someone had to be first.
Alexander Graham Bell—Twain’s buddy—was American. The international calling code for the U.S. is 1. The phone was ours.
So it was startling to learn recently that, if you want an old-fashioned copper-wire landline phone (also known as POTS—Plain Old Telephone Service) installed in your home in the country that gave the world the telephone, there’s a high chance that you won’t be able to find a telecommunications outfit willing or able to fill your order.
AT&T says it will kill off POTS by 2029. New homes are no longer automatically built with the requisite wiring. Networks are getting ripped out. In older houses, the wiring is degrading and, once it’s rotted away, it can’t be repaired or replaced.
If you’re one of 20 million Americans who live in a rural area with poor-to-nonexistent cellular service, that’s a problem. Elderly people are being cut off from their doctors. How do you call the police or ambulance service? What if you get snowed in?
Lousy cellphone service is legion, and not just in flyover country. Your smartphone is useless in the Hamptons, where wealthy locals complain that it’s easier to get a line out in Bangladesh than Sag Harbor. Hilariously, San Francisco and Silicon Valley have some of the crappiest phone service in the country. This has triggered a bizarre technological arms race as people outfit their cars with pricey signal boosters.
Everyone gives you the same suggestion: use the Internet. Cellphones allow you to place a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) call that sounds crystal clear and is (for now) cheaper than POTS. Most offers of landline service are fake. They’re really VoIP.
But, assuming you have WiFi, the Internet does go down sometimes, as do cellphone networks. AT&T was offline for 12 hours in February 2024. Tropical Storm Helene left much of North Carolina without service for months. “Sometimes” often corresponds to a storm—exactly the time when you most want to have a working phone. Then what? You can’t call or text customer service to tell them…because your Internet is, you know, down.
That scenario is when traditional landline service shines—or shone. Because a copper phone line is powered by a low-voltage power source completely independent from primary 110-volt electricity, and it’s buried and won’t get taken out by a falling tree limb, you’ll be able to call out even if the power isn’t working. You just have to buy an old phone off eBay, one from the 1970s or 1980s that runs through a modular jack and doesn’t rely on electric plugs.
Americans never talked about this. We never got together and decided, as a society, to get rid of copper-wire landlines. Perhaps, at the phone company, someone said: “No one wants or needs landlines anymore. Everyone is on their cell. (Well, 98% of everybody. But who cares about 6 million people?) If someone out in the sticks dies because the Internet is out, oh well.” Nobody told us. They just did it.
A common assumption of technological progress is that new, more advanced successors to legacy technologies either replace old features or eliminate features that are unnecessary. Often, however, we feel those losses. It is much faster to access the middle of a song on LP, by dropping the stylus wherever you want it, than to find a song on CD or MP3 and forward within it. Ripping an article out of a legacy dead-tree newspaper is faster than printing it out. New York City recently rehabbed long-disused fire and police call boxes on street corners to allow people, especially the deaf and the homeless, to report problems even if their phone was out of a charge or left at home.
Less is sometimes more. I would rather drive alongside motorists a little distracted listening to radio than to those on another planet, watching TV or YouTube.
And, as in the case of the quietly vanishing Ma Bell landline grid, it can kill you.
Or cost you more than it should. Denizens of rural America who can afford it do have an alternative to tenuous Internet connections. They can buy a satellite phone from a company like Iridium or Starlink—cost: hundreds of dollars—and subscribe to a calling plan that can easily run over $100 a month.
The scale of this stupidity is breathtaking. Without a second of thought, the United States has decided to destroy its own ability to communicate in the event of a natural disaster, civil conflict, or war. Under POTS, the only single point of failure—the vulnerable link in a system—was the telecoms’ switching hubs. Fiber-optic networks require backups all over the place, including the modem of every single Internet user in the nation.
We are one hacker or technological maintenance error away from the digital phone system being taken out over a vast swath of the country. Citizens won’t be able to contact emergency responders. Government officials won’t be able to talk to one another. You won’t be able to contact your family or friends. Businesspeople will be silenced when they need to conduct financial transactions.
We haven’t met the enemy yet. But his best friend is us.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)
