(2024-09-02) Rotary phones are underrated (feat. VEF TA-68)
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The Tesla (Typ 66?) telephone that I got as promised last week turned out to
be a bit faulty: its dial (made py Polish RWT) sometimes emitted one more
pulse per digit than necessary. And I deduced that nothing could be done
about it, so the same friend of mine got me a VEF TA-68 made in Latvia in Q3
1978 that his family had been using up until the mid-2010s. Yes, that
red-case/black-base neato had been manufactured 46 years ago, and still is
in a fully working condition, while the Tesla (seemingly) made in Jan 1990
already has some dial issues (well, it also fell from the table so the case
got several cracks as well, while the VEF's case is almost like new). It's
remarkable that both of them adhere to the ancient German-type wire color
coding, so the brownish wire is Line+ and the white one is Line-. The rest
of the wires were unnecessary in either case in order to connect the device
to the RJ-11 cable I ripped off from some faulty Genius steering wheel
pedals. Both phones passed all GR-909 tests offered by my Grandstream HT-802
ATA, so, after a bit of cleaning, the TA-68 was ready to use. It's amazing
how a 46-year old landline phone is much easier to bring back to life
without running into any legal troubles, as opposed to, say, some NMT or
AMPS mobile phone from early 1990s.
This is how my SIP DID number from Intertelecom came alive again. I had been
using it for testing my FrugalVox IVR program, but that never got any actual
use as of yet. Now, it's serving as my landline, although it's quite amusing
how this "landline" actually gets routed through a wireless mesh and then a
Starlink satellite dish. All thanks to that ATA that is being powered by a
measly microUSB cable, requiring 1A of current at most. So, with 5W max
power, you can serve _two_ such phone lines (each over a 5+ meter long VEF's
cord, mind you) and route them to various VoIP providers independently. And
here comes the most interesting part: dialing a number with a rotary dial
doesn't consume any extra line power, it's just a series of rapid
disconnections that make up these pulses. On the contrary, any push-button
keypad does consume extra power for the circuits to generate the DTMF
signals to work, and the signals also have to be loud enough, or, in case of
still using pulse dialing, to programmatically emulate those pulses on the
line. Another paradox is that pulse dialing is purely digital (it's a
variation of so-called "unary code") while DTMF (I hate the "touch-tone"
term) is analogue, being a mixture of two sine waves, while both generating
and decoding it require some digital signal processing.
So, why were rotary phones phased out so quickly (how quickly, depends on the
part of the world) despite being so simple, robust, reliable and energy
efficient? Well, the #1 answer is convenience. Not only did keypads allow to
dial the numbers faster and the electronic circuits allowed adding the
features like caller ID display and answering machines, but the introduction
of DTMF support (which, by the way, wasn't a thing until late 1990s where I
lived) by automatic phone exchanges opened up a whole new world of
possibilities to customers. Even this Grandstream HT802, despite pulse
dialing support _and_ converting pulses to tones down the line, can be
controlled internally by dialing *** (three stars) which is impossible to do
on a rotary phone. And to quickly check the balance without signing into the
Intertelecom's web portal, I need to dial *7501, again, no way I can do this
on my TA-68. I even have an Actionline DTMF beeper to be used on the phones
that don't support tone dialing — need to replace those 3xLR44 batteries
though. So, now I think you can see the problem: the phones kept working but
the world around them kept changing. Ten digits are no longer enough, it
seems. There are some workarounds like the "hook flash" technique for call
control, but this only works when you already made a connection, and there
doesn't seem to be any way to remap the flash event into dialing e.g. the
star character.
Furthermore, when cordless landline telephones were introduced, people became
hooked on them even quicker. Now you could talk virtually anywhere in the
house (or flat) and return the handset to the base station only when it
needed charging. With the first generations of cordless phones (or
radiotelephones, as we called them), no one even thought about the fact that
they could be eavesdropped to with a simple VHF/UHF receiver. This is, like,
the first time when convenience won over privacy in the history of
telecommunication for "mere mortals". Long-range radiotelephones (Senao etc)
added even more salt into the wound, interfering with other public radio
systems (and leading to innocent people being prosecuted for this) and being
equally insecure. In fact, until the introduction of the DECT standard, you
could not be sure whether the handset-base link was properly encrypted or
not. The problem with DECT standard is... when it really became widespread,
it was too late: its original encryption had been broken by 2008, and
cellphones already took over the world. The question "did mobiles kill
landlines?" is highly debatable though, I might dedicate a separate post
about it but my short answer is "I wouldn't be so sure".
What I am sure about is that, despite all those points, rotary phones are
still underrated. They still can work on remaining landlines with no extra
power required, they can be used on VoIP lines with as little as 5W of power
required in total, they don't have any electronics to possibly spy on you
inside (with a traditional landline, that's what your phone company can do,
but with VoIP, you are in control of at least some security options on the
ATA), they are not prone to radio eavesdropping (at least not without some
extremely specialized equipment), they have little to no parts that can
break under normal conditions, but even then they are extremely easy to
repair and modify, most of them still have some controls like a ringer
volume regulator, some of them have microphone mute and/or hook flash
buttons, and most importantly, they don't have _any_ distraction factors
whatsoever. You can just place and receive calls, optionally control them
with a hook flash and adjust the ringer bell volume. That's it.
