Pulse dialing

[fan-of-fans]

Are there still phone services that use pulse dialing? I ask because the landlines in our house all have a pulse/tone switch either on the base or in the menu settings.

Our Comcast VoIP is definitely tone only, the rotary phone we have will receive calls but not dial out.

I know at one time tone dialing was actually an extra charge on a bill. I just cannot imagine any current phone system still using it since most everything is computerized now.

Also, is there a reason rotary phones do not have the star * and octothorpe # keys, even if they were made after they started being included on touch tone telephones? I tried setting one of our phones to pulse dialing and notice there was no clicking generated from those.

 

[circlew]

While I don't currently possess a rotary dial phone, a couple of my neighbors do. They use them, so obviously the system (Frontier) supports such service. I also know a couple people who have working rotary dial phones, who are in the Cincinnati Bell service area. All mentioned above also have Touch Tone sets connected to their lines, so both types of dialing are supported.

Several people I know have, or have had, Spectrum (Time Warner) Cable phone service. I don't think rotary dial phones work with this service without having additional equipment to convert pulse into tone.

 

[wayupnorth]

I have Consolidated phone service and 2 old rotary phones. They always work fine in a power outage where cordless models do not. Most regular landline phone services support both types.

 

[justjunque]

We have rotary phones, Western Electric 500s, in a few of our rooms.
Our service, through Comcast cable, doesn't support pulse dialing, so we have pulse to tone converters that the phones plug into, then the converter plugs into the wall jack.
I'd prefer if we could just use the phones as designed, but this is better than not being able to use them at all.

Barry

 

[twintubdexter]

<span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #008000;">I have Spectrum/Time Warner. My 5 pound "I Love Lucy" gossip phone is a no go. It did work when I first moved here.</span>

 

[sudsmaster]

I believe that pulse dialing requires electric energy to work. Something like nine volts. That's probably an expense for the phone company that they'd rather not support. I remember some time in the 90's my old rotary phone stopped working. I looked into it and I would have had to specifically request support for for pulse dialing. And that it was an either/or, if rotary was supported, then tone would not be. So I just stored the old rotary phone.

Now I'm using an internet phone (Ooma). Tone only, as I recall.

 

[wayupnorth]

I worked for the phone company and yes, it does require a little energy and as long as any switching stations generators worked and big DC batteries held up your dial phone would always work in the days of Ma Bell. When I was a little kid, I got this make believe transistor radio with a cord that clipped on the metal dialing stop on the phone that actually worked as it got that tad of energy to run it thru the phone lines. I dont know how it worked but it did bring in local AM stations thru an earphone.

 

[jamiel]

No star or octothorp on a rotary dial...the rotary dial system is a base-10 system and doesn't have the capability to understand anything but 1-10 pulses with a pause between. Either pulse or tone are generated using the power in the phone system provided by the phone company.

 

[oliger]

I have a chocolate brown rotary kitchen phone. It was in the house when we moved in many years ago. It was originally an Indiana BELL telephone, then Ameritech and now AT&T. It has always worked, and I have never had any trouble with pulse dialing.
In the old days it was 48 Volts DC when talking on the telephone, and 90 Volts AC when ringing. Newer VOIP does not supply that level of current I believe.
Pound key and star were for newer sound operated switchboards. In the old days they didn't have that yet, and adding star and pound to the rotary dial would mean adding two columns to the exchange at every switching office in the United States. Not an easy change.
Here is what happened on the other end of the line for rotary dial phones:

 

[sfh074]

Actually ......

you can add the * and # to a rotary phone along with speed dial, redial and a few other options.

I did this to a Western Electric 202, 302, 354 and 500 a few years back and it works great and small enough to install inside each phone. If you have Ooma hooked up to the house wiring, it will easily ring 4 analog phones with bells. I have 4 phones, with bells hooked up all around the house and when the phone rings its a hoot!

I need to try a 5th set just to see if the Ooma box will supply enough juice to ring all 5. By the way it rings 4, I bet it would ring 5 sets no problem.

http://www.oldphoneworks.com/rotatone-pulse-to-tone-converter.html

Bud - Atlanta

 

[iej]

If you have a dial tone / PSTN line coming from a central office switch, rather than VoIP over fibre, cable or VDSL, then it likely still supports pulse dialing. Almost without exception, the last generation of classic digital switches were able to handle legacy pulse and rotary dial handsets without any issue. They’re largely 80s/90s digital technology. They’re disappearing fast but they’re still around. Even if the central office equipment has been updated to VoIP, it’s still probable that it would support legacy pulse dialing.

If you’ve a VoBB / VoIP service coming from ATA (analogue terminal adaptor) in your house - meaning you plug your phone into a socket on a router / cable modem / gateway of some sort, then it very likely does not support pulse dialing anymore. Most ATAs don’t support it, but it’s not impossible to get one that does.

You can get a little device (easily available on Amazon) that you plug legacy pulse dial phones into and it converts their signaling to DTMF (touch tone) which will allow you to keep those devices working for many years to come.

The bigger issue would be old phones with mechanical bells. A lot of ATAs would struggle to power the ringer.

The last pulse-dial-only central offices were electromechanical switching systems like crossbar and stepping switches. Step by step is gone a long time (mid 80s here) and the last local crossbars in service (which were fairly likely to have had computerized registers) retired in the US and Europe before the year 2000. It’s possible a very small number survived into the early days of the 21st century but it would be pretty exceptional and they wouldn’t have been truly analogue systems and certainly didn’t last long. They were still being installed though well into the 1970s, so got their 30 years of service. Some crossbar switches did support tone dialing - the later iterations or Western Electric’s crossbars, Ericsson ARF & ARE and ITT various versions of ITT Metaconta and Pentaconta all did, as did some other analogue electronic systems like reed relay exchanges like Philips PRD/A, Ericsson AKE, British TXE and so on.

Generally electromechanical systems were ripped out quite quickly, especially the less sophisticated types as they were very high maintenance.

Digital local switching was rolled out beginning in the late 1970s and very rapidly though the 80s and 90s.

But anyway, to cut a long story shot: you should be able to still connect your pulse dial phones with an adaptor / converter device if you want to keep them running into the future.

 

[petek]

A friend of mine still has rotary service.. he has to use the pulse to dial out on and then switch to tone to select number choices on a menu driven automated answering system. It's also a party line with no remaining party on his line. LOL. Bell keeps offering him incentives to upgrade to touch tone obviously so they can divest themselves of all the remaining switch equipement but they can't force him.. yet anyways.

 

[DADoES]

 
Regards to charges ... my landline bill has a $0.18 monthly line-item charge for Touchtone.  Granny had pulse dialing on her line.  Her bills (through to the last one for Dec 2013) did not state that extra charge.

 

[ladyearth]

I asked Hubby to rem rotary

he put in our detached garage yrs ago. as I couldn't call certain numbers plus it was a pain in butt and missed the caller ID cause all the AI calls we get selling braces fake vac, insurance , phones Microsoft , Credit card low interest stuff Y'all know the good for nutting spam calls with the fake caller Ids numbers...
our vacant neighbor and friend still as his old rotary upstairs The survivors haven't sold his unfinished home yet waiting for certain repairs to be made before listing it on the mkt. and the landline still is hooked up.
Hubby thinks Our Buddy maybe haunting it kind of,
I mentioned to Hubby some real creeps loud etc may buy it. Then he'd be enveloped by Ass. hats...

 

[cadman]

I run an OOMA VOIP here (with ring-through from my cell number). Plugged into the OOMA is my trusty Panasonic PBX that converts any rotary phone to touchtone on the fly, and has the current to drive a load of vintage phones. Bonus is you can call between any phone on the property with 2-digit dialing.

End goal is to get my outdoor phone booth set up along with my 555 switchboard. 'Inter-office' and trunk!

 

[wayupnorth]

Not far from me is a collection of phone things back from the original operator assisted calls put together from old employees of Ma Bell. It can be found at thetelephonemuseum.org.