Make The Right Call

How Pay Phones and Household Landlines Might End Up Being Your Lifelines During an Emergency

- Richard Duarte

Land line phones and public telephone booths were once as common as typewriters, transistor radios, and corner mailboxes. Fast-forward 30 years, however, and everything about how we communicate has drastically changed. Today, pay phones and land line phones are on the endangered species list, while the use of cellular and Internet based phone networks has exploded.

In January 2017, a report from the Pew Research Center concluded that the vast majority of Americans (95 percent) now own a cellphone of some kind. With so many cell phones, and the proliferation of high-speed internet communications, are pay phones and land line phones really just a relic of the past? And can the wired technology of the last century be of any practical use in an era dominated by smart devices and the ever-growing availability of wireless comms?

Pay phones and land line phones may be going the way of the dinosaurs, but if you know where to look, there’s still tremendous value to be found in this dated technology.

In this article, we discuss how the land line phones that many folks consider to be dead and buried may actually still have quite a bit more to offer, especially when the high-tech modern communications systems we rely on go dark.

The Wireless Revolution

It all started on April 3, 1973. On that date, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the world’s first mobile phone call. The historic call was reportedly made to Motorola’s main competitor at Bell Systems to let them know that Motorola had done it first — it must have been some conversation.

Ten years later, the world’s first mobile phone hit the market at a cost of $3,995 (roughly $5,800 in today’s money). Few people at that time could have ever imagined just how significant that first call really was, and how it set in motion the events that’d change everything about how we communicate.