That’s because cell phone audio quality in the analog era was shit. Knowing that you’d be giving condolences with a hissy, staticky, distorted voice is kinda rude when a landline payphone isn’t that far away.
It was more that the person you were calling meant so little to you that you made the call while you were doing other things. Back then calling someone was almost like meeting them for coffee, often you would pre arrange the rough time you would call, and you were both engaged in the activity because you had to be at home sitting next to the phone. There was a certain effort to it that would seem lacking if you just could pull out a phone while you were walking down the street.
In the early 2000s I was still arranging landline calls ahead of time with my friends because you couldn’t use the internet at the same time as the phone.
A good portion of houses in my country never received a telephone line. Straight from arranging calls between phone booths to mobile.
Before 1989, the state monopoly had an installation backlog of several years (you could only get a line fast if you were high up in the party or had friends at the telco), high monthly fees and was woefully behind on tech: there was no digital voice equipment on the whole network, while the US’s Bell trunk network had all-digital audio by 1970. Even until like 1980, in regional towns of 30k-50k, they required you to speak to operators for out-of-town calls. After 1990, the company privatized but it was still prohibitively expensive to get a line set up, as so much money needed to be spent to belatedly bring the network into the digital era. The monopoly ended around 2000 and prices went down but by that point, people saw the dawn of mobile and didn’t want to pay for a new phone line anymore.
That’s because cell phone audio quality in the analog era was shit. Knowing that you’d be giving condolences with a hissy, staticky, distorted voice is kinda rude when a landline payphone isn’t that far away.
It was more that the person you were calling meant so little to you that you made the call while you were doing other things. Back then calling someone was almost like meeting them for coffee, often you would pre arrange the rough time you would call, and you were both engaged in the activity because you had to be at home sitting next to the phone. There was a certain effort to it that would seem lacking if you just could pull out a phone while you were walking down the street.
People weren’t still scheduling calls in the '90s. We had answering machines and even voicemail by then.
In the early 2000s I was still arranging landline calls ahead of time with my friends because you couldn’t use the internet at the same time as the phone.
A good portion of houses in my country never received a telephone line. Straight from arranging calls between phone booths to mobile.
Before 1989, the state monopoly had an installation backlog of several years (you could only get a line fast if you were high up in the party or had friends at the telco), high monthly fees and was woefully behind on tech: there was no digital voice equipment on the whole network, while the US’s Bell trunk network had all-digital audio by 1970. Even until like 1980, in regional towns of 30k-50k, they required you to speak to operators for out-of-town calls. After 1990, the company privatized but it was still prohibitively expensive to get a line set up, as so much money needed to be spent to belatedly bring the network into the digital era. The monopoly ended around 2000 and prices went down but by that point, people saw the dawn of mobile and didn’t want to pay for a new phone line anymore.