Number, Please!

Numbers, numbers, numbers. So many numbers. When we were growing up as teenagers and well into our adulthood, it was the norm to have an internal mental stash of telephone numbers - family, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends; and entering the world of work, numbers related to your job. Most of us carried around in our heads tens or hundreds of the damned things, all of which could be recalled at will, rarely having to resort to a book for a reminder. How many people these days know their number? I know mine because I've had the same network connection since 2003, in the pre-smartphone era, and I still use my iPhone as a telephone, from time to time, a practice which looked as if it might be on the wane at one time, with a preponderance of users sticking to text and social media alone to 'communicate' with each other.

Before 1983, there was no generally used device that could be called a 'mobile phone'; and it was not until the mid-1990s until they entered more general use, due to the sheer expense of both the devices themselves, and the usurious network and call charges they attracted at the time. In the era of the analogue mobile phone, very few people could afford to own and use one, and an actual connection was a pretty much hit and miss affair due to the woeful lack of network coverage here in the UK in the early days. I bought my first mobile phone back in 1990 - an NEC P3 (which I still have somewhere). This cost me nearly seven hundred quid in today's prices, and that was discounted down from the equivalent cost of my current iPhone 16 Pro. 

There were only two networks available at that time here: Vodafone and Cellnet, and only Vodafone had any real coverage outside of London: the inside of the M25 motorway that circles the capital being the only place in the UK with guaranteed coverage. In North Wales, we happened to live for a very short time in the only decent coverage area: Llangoed, right next to the to one of the very few masts between Ireland and Shropshire. I seem to remember being able to use my phone in Ceregydridion, of all places; the next strong signal being Shrewsbury in Shropshire. For this ridiculously spartan service I paid a flat line rental of twenty-seven quid and fifty pence per minute call charges to the UK; equivalent, roughly, now to £68/month rental and £1.27/minute in call charges, which as you can imagine, made calls as terse as one could make them, unless one was showing off, of course. Nevertheless, I remember monthly bills of nearly £130 on occasion when working away: about £330 today. And this for a device that only managed voice calls. Even texting had yet be invented.

Head back to the mid-1960s and [for the next twenty years] the only gig in town was the landline. In 1965 these were still the province of the middle classes and up, largely. All lines were subscriber lines: the General Post Office owned all aspects of a phone installation and charged for not only the calls, but a rental for the line itself and all telephone apparatus installed [extensions were charged for separately, both to be installed, and for rent]. It wasn't cheap, and it took up to six months for a domestic line and apparatus to be provided. We were probably the first working class family in Winson Green to have a domestic telephone, which was expedited to around a week's installation from order as it was to be a business line [an extra charge applied, of course]. The speed of the GPO's response was probably expedited by my uncle Edgar who also just happened to work for the GPO; almost certainly the reason why my maternal grandparents were very early adopters of the technology in the early 1960s. I still to this day remember our first telephone number: SME(thwick) 0620, later 558-0620 under the incoming Subscriber Trunk Dialling system that removed the need for telephone operators and became ultimately ubiquitous: the system itself now mutating fully into the universe of Voice Over Internet Protocol as the old copper dial tone is being phased out.

Progress of sorts, and we seem now to have internalised the woeful shortcomings of using mobiles for voice, with its dropouts and often bizarre audio artefacting, particularly in cities where the airwaves are rapidly becoming saturated with data. The old copper landlines could be faint and noisy, but no-one ever turned into a Dalek or stuttered like a damaged audio CD as a result of data dropout or buffering issues. The one thing that worries me, however, is emergency calling in a national [or even domestic] crisis. Copper was never invulnerable, but it was simple to bring back into service should the worst happen, even using ad hoc temporary measures. If the digital networks go down, what then? I can't help thinking that the powers-that-be will have made provision for the worst by leaving at least a skeleton spine of copper, connecting all the major centres of administration, in the case of war. If they haven't, then more fool them and woe betide the rest of us...