Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

Having enjoyed the phreak subculture from the time I was a wee child, and truly learning so much about the way the world (and network optimization) worked through telephony over decades, this just makes me sad and sick. I am not suggesting landline service is the only thing that should exist, but this seems really just depressing (from a nostalgic standpoint) and dangerous (from a 'what was copper good for, anyway?' standpoint). But I guess noone needs reliable emergency communications. At least POTS is not totally gone in the States yet.

Still remembering the Hawaiian storm that made Kauai a bastion of cutting edge telephony in the 1990s and the way people let go of landlines in NY after the Hurricane there about a decade ago.

So long, weird quirky Finnish system, though I hardly knew ye.

In Finland many news outlets had the same headline, but needed to correct it. It's the last big operator who closed their network. There are still a couple of smaller local operators that have not yet stopped. Finland traditionally had many local phone companies and a few have obviosly survived.

Soon to be repeated in the UK, by the end of January 2027. We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.

It's taken British telcos years to plan for this, and it's been put off a couple of times to deal with practical problems such as situations where you absolutely can't put fiber-to-the-premises in in any reasonable timescale.

This time they really seem to be determined to make it happen, even if it involves bizarro products like SOGEA, and if I recall correctly a sort of exchange-hosted baseband-only single-line DSLAM for the most intractable cases such as elderly people with no access to mains power - but even then it will implement the standard Digital Voice protocols, not the legacy DSLAM stuff.

My biggest complaint as a user of an old analogue touchtone (the classic AT&T wallmount you're thinking of right now, in red) is: fiberoptic VOIP "telephone lines" don't have the wattage to ring a classic brass bellset – which is okay if you're like me and never want your phone to ring – but sometimes you need this feature.

You can't even imagine how difficult it is to even source a corded telephone locally (outside of the really expensive fax machines, with attached handset).

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POTS was a brilliant invention; it saddens me that US Radio Operator licenses recently began requiring emails for renewals (which I legitimately don't/won't use). ...sort of thought the principle of being Hams included lowtech communications technologies (not eternal "to do" lists == email).

It seems like our interconnectedness has been going backwards for at least a few decades.

Pity, copper made everything better.

This is an annoying paragraph:

"Copper wires, the kind of cabling used in landlines for over a century, can only carry a limited amount of data. They carry phone calls as a continuous electrical signal that mimics the original sound wave, which is what makes them analogue."

If someone reads this quickly, they might easily conclude that data is also transmitted as analogue sound signals (like a POTS modem) when ADSL has been around for many years and has pretty high throughput.