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It is very likely that in the past couple of years, you have heard people say that the telephone is the least important aspect of their mobile phone. We even make jokes about it, saying things like, “Oh, and it also makes phone calls!” We complain that our mobile plans are too heavy on the phone minutes, and too light on the high-speed data. It is as if we think that life would be so much better if the plain old telephone service would just hurry up and die.

To all that, I say, balderdash! Without the telephone, life as we know it, would come to a screeching halt. And you wouldn’t even be able to call and commiserate with your best chum about the onset of the apocalypse. And it is not just individuals that need phones. If anything, businesses need them more than ever. If you were to start a business teaching people how to do business without a telephone, you would still need a telephone to get that business off the ground. Here are 6 good reasons why the telephone is here to stay:

It Just Works

If your landline bill is all paid up, when you pick up the receiver, you get a dial tone. End of story. You have never owned, and are unlikely to ever own any piece of technology more reliable than a telephone. When the rest of your higher technology crashes and burns, you pick up the phone and call tech support. You know the one thing you have never needed tech support for? Your phone line. That’s what.

There is absolutely nothing on the horizon being proposed as a telephone replacement that is as reliable, not even close. If you are an avid listener to podcasts, you already know that when Skype breaks down, as it inevitably does, the host turns to the phone for bringing their guest back on the show. One of the many reasons your business needs a phone line is because nothing is more reliable in a pinch.

Certain Communication

The best line from the movie, “WarGames” happens early in the movie. Two men are going through the procedure of launching nuclear weapons. They do not have confirmation of the order. Captain Lawson demands they get confirmation with the powerful line:

Screw the procedure, I want somebody on the phone before I kill 20 million people!

Granted, this was 1983. Text messaging hadn’t really been invented yet. That said, I’m pretty sure the sentiment would have been the same had the movie been filmed today. The Battlestar Galactica reboot was made in the 2000s, and depicted the distant future. Yet the most secure and reliable communication the writers could imagine was a land-line telephone. When the certainty of orders matter, the president does not get on an IM. He gets on the telephone for certain communication.

The Most Compatible Technology

Trains don’t work on roads. And cars don’t work on tracks. But voice calls work on copper and over the air. They work on POTS and VoIP systems. Voice calls are easy to produce on inexpensive equipment. Telephones are compatible and interoperable. If you know how to operate an old one, you will likely already know how to use the new one. As one vendor of office telephone systems puts it:

On-site, hosted, or hybrid, every phone system package is built bespoke for your needs and can be integrated with existing IT infrastructure.

This kind of cross compatibility with old and new infrastructure can’t be said of many things other than the telephone.

Call for Help

Have you ever tried doing tech support over a live chat? How about a not so live email? Frankly, it’s a nightmare. Tech support fails on anything except a telephone. That’s because when you absolutely need the help of another individual, you are already not at your best. You are distraught, and probably a little scared. You will not be communicating at your clearest. When the chips are down, you need a real person to talk to. Your customers are the same way. Often, telephone tech support is the difference between them choosing you as opposed to your competition.
In an emergency situation, nothing beats a telephone call. If you are badly damaged, you may not be able to send a complicated text message or answer questions about your location and condition. Even a garbled phone call can save your life. If help is on the way, it is most likely the result of a timely phone call.

The Human Touch

The Yellow Pages slogan used to be, “Reach out and touch someone”. Ironically, physical touch is one of the few things the telephone is not good for. But metaphorically, the human touch is on offer from the humble telephone. Even if a support bot could solve our problem, what we want, as humans, is to be heard by other humans. We want to know that someone knows about our dissatisfaction, and appreciates our predicament.

An email can be generated by a computer. Even whole news articles are routinely written by bots. We don’t want a bot apologizing for our inconvenience. We want to know that there is a human being on the other end who feels our pain, and can help us overcome it. There is a reason political campaigners knock on doors, shake hands, and kiss babies. It forms a human connection. The most effective way to influence a politician is still by placing a phone call. You cannot form remote, human connections without it.

Everybody Has One, and Knows How to Use It

Finally, perhaps the best reason to keep your phone active despite newer tech is that everybody in the world has one, and knows how to use it. There are plenty of places where sending and receiving data is effectively impossible, but a phone call gets through. The telephony infrastructure is globally ubiquitous.

If you want to reach someone, anyone, you can be pretty sure that they have at least one phone number where they can be reached, regardless of any other technology they may have. You can hire just about anyone in the world and know that they will be able to operate the telephone, no matter how complicated your business phone may be. At the end of the day, it is still a handset and 10 digits. Bulky landline or pocketable smart, the phone is the most universal technology there is.

Downgrade the telephone at your company’s peril. At some point, everyone, including me, has said something disparaging about the telephone. But when it really matters, it’s a phone call that your mother wants from you, and your loved ones need from you when you are away on business. There are times when an Instant Message just won’t do. Those times are when you have to be highly accessible, when the human touch is required, in case of emergencies, when you need to be compatible with every kind of infrastructure, when communication absolutely has to be certain, and when it simply has to work. Technologically, we are nowhere near hanging up on the telephone.