"Daddy, why is that man talking on a string?" is likely something I'll hear in the next 10 years. Hollywood might be able to scrub out smoking from their old movies, but the landline cannot be erased.
What a strange notion it will seem, the idea that we had to run wiring across the country to communicate with each other. It's very much like the two-cans-and-a-string invention, though put on an international scale. We even laid wire underneath the ocean.
But now colleges are debating whether or not to even have landlines. As the great recession ripples, people are giving up their landlines. And sure Vonage is pretty freaking cheap, but Skype is cheaper. Even Iowans are fast to join the wireless world. In fact, the move toward landline cutting is most prevalent in the midwest. Of course, in many countries landlines have long been abandoned. Even three years ago, 10% of americans were wireless-only.
We hear less and less that that cellphones cause cancer. There's a cellphone just for the elderly. Even Sprint, the phone company for old people, is selling commercial air time promoting the wireless age. Soon enough, even our cell phones won't need wires.
What will happen to those billions of miles of telephone wires? I have no idea. At least the birds will still have a place to sit.
Also: telemarketers.
Please. What do you think the internet is? A landline. I would never trade the vastly superior quality and reliability of my office and home phone for a landline. In fact, given that most of us are at home, the office, or another place with a phone throughout the day, what is the point of cell phones again?
ReplyDeleteLOL man going back and reading some of these comments it's like wait what?
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