Slugmax wrote about poor cellular 
phone call quality in his recent post, 
noting that he and his wife are "both 
old enough to remember when phone call 
quality did not suck. It all makes me 
want to go back to a landline and 
tape-based answering machine."[1]

It's amusing that compression 
technologies have worsened audio 
quality in comparison to some of the 
old analog technologies we used to 
use. 

As for a landline, I didn't want to 
pay the local monopoly price for a 
true landline. Nor did I want to pay 
their competitors' VOIP price. So I 
set up a VOIP account with one of 
those generic VOIP providers. It 
approximates landline quality (of 
course, that depends on your codec 
preferences and whether or not you're 
talking to someone with a crappy cell 
connection...). I've used a few 
different VOIP providers over the 
years since then, and my experience 
is, the closer their facilities are to 
you, the better. Nothing beats a short 
ping time, no matter what the VOIP 
people might try to tell you.

The other thing that I really like 
about VOIP relates to Slugmax's 
statement about going back to a 
tape-based answering machine. Perhaps 
that was meant in jest, but when I was 
figuring out what equipment I'd need 
to set up my VOIP account, I stumbled 
across a forum where people were 
discussing an analog telephone adapter 
(or ATA) called the Grandstream HT502. 
It's great asset: you can still dial 
out with your rotary phone. Perhaps 
Grandstream's newer ATAs have this 
feature too. I don't know. I bought 
the HT502 and it has been working 
for years.

In any case, since I switched to VOIP, 
I have an old black desk phone (with a 
really classic ring... it always gets 
comments) and an old school answering 
machine. I love that I can hear people 
leaving messages when I'm doing 
something else, so I can decide 
whether or not to call them back right 
away. Sometimes, older really was 
better. And it's stupid cool[2].

Well, sometimes. There's nothing 
slower than dialing 10-digit numbers, 
especially when all the digits are at 
the high end...

One more thing: one of the most fun 
things about having a rotary phone is 
that people have uploaded all kinds of 
retro telephone dial cards (those 
little round cards that you put your 
number on in the center of the dial). 
So your choice of dial cards is almost 
limitless.

[1] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/%7eslugmax/phlog/2019-08-24-crappy-cellular

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1zYNrsx9Pw