Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

7/4/2026 at 6:24:49 PM

Having enjoyed the phreak subculture from the time I was a wee child, and truly learning so much about the way the world (and network optimization) worked through telephony over decades, this just makes me sad and sick. I am not suggesting landline service is the only thing that should exist, but this seems really just depressing (from a nostalgic standpoint) and dangerous (from a 'what was copper good for, anyway?' standpoint). But I guess noone needs reliable emergency communications. At least POTS is not totally gone in the States yet.

Still remembering the Hawaiian storm that made Kauai a bastion of cutting edge telephony in the 1990s and the way people let go of landlines in NY after the Hurricane there about a decade ago.

So long, weird quirky Finnish system, though I hardly knew ye.

by jambalaya8

7/4/2026 at 7:52:06 PM

How is copper more reliable than fibre as an emergency communications medium? I guess 1800s technology suffices to transmit something over copper, so there's that.

by Sharlin

7/4/2026 at 8:05:20 PM

For residential users in Finland, the last-mile replacement for POTS is not fibre but cellular, at least where phone calls are concerned.

by AnssiH

7/4/2026 at 6:05:26 PM

Soon to be repeated in the UK, by the end of January 2027. We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.

It's taken British telcos years to plan for this, and it's been put off a couple of times to deal with practical problems such as situations where you absolutely can't put fiber-to-the-premises in in any reasonable timescale.

This time they really seem to be determined to make it happen, even if it involves bizarro products like SOGEA, and if I recall correctly a sort of exchange-hosted baseband-only single-line DSLAM for the most intractable cases such as elderly people with no access to mains power - but even then it will implement the standard Digital Voice protocols, not the legacy DSLAM stuff.

by lambdaone

7/4/2026 at 6:42:22 PM

What are the plans for people who can't get fibre to the property?

by AndrewDucker

7/4/2026 at 6:53:56 PM

There are multiple options, including internet from mobile phone providers and satellite internet. The affordability and speeds are good enough that it's not a major problem.

That said, there are devices that depend on the old phone network that need to be replaced, such as alarm systems for vulnerable people, but the risk of vulnerable people that can't switch to VoIP services is fairly low, especially as this switchover has been known about for a long time.

by ZenoArrow

7/4/2026 at 6:54:27 PM

IP-only != fibre. Try reading my comment above in its entirety. You can also read this for further enlightenment about SOGEA:

https://www.btwholesale.com/products-and-services/data/sogea...

I wish I had a link for the other thing, but it was deep inside some Openreach site that Google don't seem to have access to.

by lambdaone

7/4/2026 at 6:11:18 PM

Over the past couple of years, my parents have had several multi-day outages with their phone line. Each time, we contacted Sky, who contacted Openreach and they eventually fixed things, but then it would stop working again months later.

I guess they're just not maintaining that infrastructure like they used to.

Finally my parents succumbed and now their phone is plugged into their router.

by rahimnathwani

7/4/2026 at 6:20:45 PM

Right now, Openreach are maintaining two entirely different local loop networks, one baseband and other IP. My experience of their PON network is that it's rock solid, and that's clearly where all the effort is going - it's much easier to keep connectivity if you can link your PON headend to the exchange via multiple fibre paths so when street works sever one cable the other keeps working, unlike with legacy copper-to-the-exchange.

They very much want to cut that back to one; big cost savings. And there are eventually going to be (hundreds of?) millions to be made from tearing the copper out from underneath the pavements and selling it, unless copper thieves get there first.

by lambdaone

7/4/2026 at 6:06:08 PM

This is an annoying paragraph:

"Copper wires, the kind of cabling used in landlines for over a century, can only carry a limited amount of data. They carry phone calls as a continuous electrical signal that mimics the original sound wave, which is what makes them analogue."

If someone reads this quickly, they might easily conclude that data is also transmitted as analogue sound signals (like a POTS modem) when ADSL has been around for many years and has pretty high throughput.

by rahimnathwani

7/4/2026 at 7:06:05 PM

I think it's alright.

It conveys what needs to be conveyed in an approachable way. It could be more accurate and/or precise, but it shares this quality with a lot of other explanations of technical things that are written for broad audiences. I'm inclined to give some slack to a journalist from Kosovo who probably did not learn English as their first language.

If I were editing it then I'd consider replacing the word "data" with "information," to encompass the entire gamut. But it is not particularly egregious as-presented.

> If someone reads this quickly, they might easily conclude that data is also transmitted as analogue sound signals (like a POTS modem) when ADSL has been around for many years and has pretty high throughput.

If someone were to reach that conclusion, then it would be a valid conclusion.

Data may come out as 1s and 0s (or digital words or frames or whatevers) after demodulation at either end, but on the copper wire between those endpoints ADSL is absolutely an analog signalling system. That's what it is designed to be.

by ssl-3

7/4/2026 at 6:16:50 PM

It's half right (the worst sort of right) digital data is carried over ADSL/VDSL as OFDM analog waveforms, albeit with frequencies well above the audio range.

by lambdaone

7/4/2026 at 7:32:41 PM

I mean, technically it is, just the 'sound waves' are square waves of varying height/width

by pdntspa

7/4/2026 at 7:44:28 PM

ADSL is designed to use frequencies beyond the range of human hearing.

by rahimnathwani