Using a Landline Phone in 2025

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Smartphones have almost completely replaced the landline telephone for home and personal use. Some of us might forget all of the items smartphones have replaced over the years. For those who were born when smartphones were already commonplace, landlines are ancient history, like turntables and AM radio. They are artifacts seen in a history book, or in YouTube videos, rarely directly experienced.

Smartphones have replaced watches (for the most part), calculators, cameras, walkmans, portable gaming devices, organizers, the Rolodex, kitchen timers, and of course, landline phones.

Even in a corporate or business setting, where a landline telephone is still on many desks, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and many other messaging and video conference tools have mostly replaced the phone sitting on the desk.

Even when phone calls are needed, we most often use our cell phones and call colleagues’ cell phones. Or we use the messaging app the company prefers, on our smartphones, such as Teams.

This post is not indented to be a complete history of landline telephones, but more of a summary of my experiences as a kid in the late 70s into the 80s and the technology available at the time.

Before the Smartphone

Before the smartphone (or the cell phone), landline telephone service was all that was available. It used two thin copper wires for service, often referred to as “twisted pair” wiring.

This was quite a feat at the time – simple wiring providing everything needed to send and receive audio, power for the telephone itself, dialing capability (eventually), and the ring signal. This physical wiring was brought to every home and business (the subscribers for phone service) and switching offices would electrically connect the calls between handsets.

My experience with landline phones started in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Back in the early 1980s, rotary dial phones were still commonplace, and only the phone company provided telephone equipment. In fact, they did not sell the equipment, you rented it from them.

I remember when the phone company would charge an extra fee for touch tone dialing (via a slightly higher phone rental fee), which at the time was an upgrade over the rotary phone. Dialing was far quicker with touch tone dialing and you can even get phones which had memories for storing important or most used numbers.

Another advantage of the touch tone phones was the “redial” button, which was quite useful when the party you were dialing was busy.

Rotary Dialing

Landline telephones evolved over time, from party lines (shared between houses in a neighborhood), to dedicated subscriber lines. Early on, before automated switching, switchboard operators would need to connect calls, often times between several switching stations.

Eventually, automated switching was invented and became widely available. Several methods for automated switching were used over the decades. The first widely used and most common at the time was pulse dialing, accomplished using a rotary dial telephone.

Those who remember rotary dialing recall how slow it was to dial a number, and especially for numbers which had zeros and nines.

Western Electric Model 500 Telephone

The rotary dial system eventually replaced the need for switchboard operators to place calls between subscribers. The dial method was “pulse” (as opposed to the later “touch tone”).

A rotary wheel would generate pulses as it spun around back to the starting point. The count of pulses received at the switching office would indicate each digit being dialed.

You can see on the rotary phone example above that the “1” position is closest to the finger stop (which generates one pulse), while the “0” is the farthest from the finger stop (which generates ten pulses).

The spacing between pulses is important in order for the switching office to detect pulses in series for the same digit being dialed versus the pauses in between digits. After a long enough pause, the switching office would assume the dialing is completed.

Incidentally, you could also pulse dial by pressing the switch hook manually, with the same spacing and dial without the rotary wheel.

Once touch tone dialing was released, many touch tone phones would have a tone/pulse switch for backward compatibility with pulse only service. Pressing the buttons would electronically generate the corresponding pulses, just as a rotary dial phone would have.

For pulse only service, the convenience of pressing buttons still had an advantage over rotary phones, as well as the redial button. The pulse option on these phones allowed for some benefits without having to purchase the upgraded touch tone service.

Touch Tone Dialing

Spinning around the wheel on the rotary phone to place a call was time consuming. Eventually touch tone dialing was introduced. This system would use tones that the switching offices would detect for each digit being dialed.

The specific tone format is...