Ditching the landline in a digital world

CHANGE. It is a recurrent theme for this column, because it really must be one of the biggest issues to face people who have reached a time in life when everything they’ve known for decades is evolving out of all recognition, or disappearing altogether. The rate of change has accelerated beyond belief and many of us are being left gobsmacked, bewildered and confused.

Take the demise of the landline telephone. I never thought it could happen, but this week I decided to ditch the old phone, and the mile long bit of copper wire that goes with it. I realise people under the age of 30 – who’d never dream of owning a device attached to a cable – would look askance at this, but out here in the countryside landlines have been essential for a long time. Indeed, those old phone lines became even more important to us as we entered the Online Age. The term “online” was used because for most of its life the internet was delivered down lengths of copper wire.

For all its faults, the landline has been delivering some kind of internet service to my cottage for 25 years despite fights with tree-branches and other skirmishes with Mother Nature.

But now our valley has 4G coverage which supports much faster broadband speeds and there’s equipment that can be bolted to the outside of a house which delivers a signal to the various devices inside. It gets better: in certain parts of the West Country you can apply to the Connecting Devon and Somerset Mobile Boost Voucher Scheme and, if you live in a sufficiently bad broadband spot (which I do), you can get a grant to help install this stuff.

Whoopee! If it works as well as advertised I’ll be ditching the landline and saving myself a tidy sum at the same time as enjoying broadband speeds five times faster than we have now.

What’s not to like? I love new technology! Except… Well, except I am used to having the type of phone that is permanently connected to a piece of wire in the hallway.

Why the hallway? Why was it that just about every household with a telephone – from the squire’s mansion to the Hesp family’s old council house – always had its phone in the hallway? A room no-one ever dawdled or sat in, a bland portal which was there simply for moving through.

Did my busy journalist dad who worked from home have a phone on his desk so he could take notes while interviewing people? Of course not. It was in the hallway like everyone else’s phone, so poor old dad would be out there in that draughty seatfree room for hours, hunched on the stairs with a notebook on his knee.

I guess phones were put in hallways because they were the most central place in a home. But why not the living room, where people… um.. lived?

Telephones came into common usage in the UK just under 100 years ago, but if my recollections are anything to go by there weren’t that many around in the ’50s and ’60s. For a long while, only my dad and a local builder had a phone in our Somerset council estate. There would be queues every evening at the phone-box at the end of the road – and I remember seeing people getting cross and doing that angry-folding-arms thing if some hapless lover was spending too long whispering sweet-nothings to her distant boyfriend.

In emergencies, or if there was something important that needed discussing in a more private setting, our neighbours would come to our place and ask to use the phone. Which was great fun for us kids because we’d hide behind the bannister at the top of the stairs and listen to all manner of intimate secrets and agonies. I remember a local tough guy weeping like a baby as he whispered hoarsely down the phone for his wife to come home and end the affair she was having with some ne’er-do-well from a neighbouring village.

Now most of us have our own individual phones in our pockets, if we’ve got one. A pocket, I mean. I remember years ago being surprised to see a tribal chief in a remote Borneo rainforest whip a phone out from his loin-cloth to make a call.

So change. Yes… but I was thinking it must have seemed like an even bigger change a century ago when people were discovering they could have a miracle placed in their homes. A miracle that allowed them to talk to anyone, anywhere, from the comfort of their own hallway.

That was a hell of a change – and one that altered the entire landscape. Imagine the outrage there’d be today if some telephone company announced: “We are going to cover the entire country in 30ft poles. Across towns and cities and throughout the countryside they’ll be hung with wires all the way from Land’s End to John O’Groats.”

Don’t dial M for murder, but C for change. In fact, don’t dial anything. Or give anyone a ring. The last phone with a physical bell attached must have left the factory years ago. Now we live in the age of the silentvibrate.

‘Every household with a phone, from mansion to council house, put it in the hall‘