Are You For Or Against Cellphones

I hate all that.

I never seen a car with that stuff in it yet. Keep in mind though. I refuse to a modern car made past 1984.

I think today vehicles are garage

@HumanEarth If I'm traveling in a city, I always have the GPS mapping and guidance onscreen. Even if I know the city pretty well, there can be traffic jams, detours, etc. and the GPS deals with that smoothly. Also hands free voice calling, speaking my destination into the GPS, etc. My wife & I spent decades navigating with road atlases, folding maps, guidebooks, etc; I don't miss that stuff at all!

@FreddieUK Good point! infrastructure for wireless smart phones is much cheaper than the equivalent wired infrastructure would be.

Sad part it's not as reliable as the old copper lines were.

@HumanEarth Until a storm blows down a tree that hits a pole or cable span, and fifty or 100 wire pairs have to be spliced with no errors.

Not even on eBay

@HumanEarth What I mean is there is no *service* available. Telstra was raped by the federal government under Liberal/Republican party control and forced to hand over most copper in-ground networks to NBN co. PSTN phone line services, and ADSL internet service are only still available in rural/remote areas. Everywhere else copper phone services were ended and now the copper lines connect to a NBN node cabinet (fibre to the node) in most urban centres. Internet is via VDSL, and if a person wants a landline phone it's a VoIP one not a real oldskool one.

Otherwise, copper lines no longer by default are a 'phone service'.

The other main difference is that oldskool phones lines were powered from the exchange that they linked back to. 48 volts for normal phone lines, 96 volts for ISDN (2/10/30 'channels'). NBN nodes supply no power to the line so all customer premises equipment is powered at the customer premises and an oldskool phone won't work since it can't get a dialtone and there is no line power.

Obviously all FTTN cabinets must have a mains power supply linked from the electricity grid and I've never seen inside a cabinet to know what the equipment looks like. With the big push to take up EV's and move away from reliable power stations the reliabilty of the NBN is questionable at best. Telephone exchanges used to have very significant power backup to deal with power failures so phones kept working.

@zonavar68 Yes, it's going that way in the UK over the next couple of years.

Don't give in, always fight the system. I love being a pain in the ass

@HumanEarth The same with me

@jackson55 It can be just a phone. I believe basic phones are still available and very cheap compared with smart phones so there is a choice.

@FreddieUK Yeah, you can get a flip phone that’s just talk and text. No Internet.