A Western Electric 500 telephone issue....

[Jeffhs]

I've had Time Warner Cable phone service for some time, and it works well with both phones in my apartment (both are Touch-Tone with capability to switch to pulse, if necessary). I haven't used dial phones in years; in fact, the last time I had a rotary phone was at my previous residence, about five years before I moved. The telephone company at the time (AT&T, IIRC) switched to touch-tone just about that time, and I was able to use a rotary dial phone with no problems, but I had switched to touch-tone by then so this wasn't an issue for me.

However, these days I just might have trouble with rotary phones on today's touch-tone service, for reasons others have mentioned. I have yet to use a rotary dial phone with the phone service I have now, mainly because I don't have dial phones anymore (got rid of them years ago and didn't look back), so I cannot comment on how well or how poorly they work with modern digital phone lines. My best guess is that, as another VK member has mentioned, dial phones could well be incompatible with digital lines by virtue of the difference in dialing speeds.

In most cases, but not necessarily all, dial phones will not work with business phone systems that use menus to connect callers to different services, since these systems are almost always configured for touch-tone phones only. One VK member mentioned that he was able to use his 1940s-vintage dial phone on such a system, even to use the menu selections, but I think that is a rare exception; most of the time, modern systems will ignore dial pulses. If they do manage to connect to a modern phone system, it is entirely possible the dial could send the wrong signals; for instance, dialing 1 could cause the system to activate menu option 3 or any other option available on that line.

If you want to try your antique dial phone on a modern line, you can (the telephone company or your cable company won't mind or care unless the phone somehow damages their network, by virtue of a short or other problem), but don't expect it to work--well or at all. That is, you may be able to dial out and to receive calls as normal, but don't expect miracles as far as using these phones with business telephone systems goes; the experiment will almost always fail miserably. The VK member whose 1940s rotary phone does work on these sophisticated systems must have a phone with a dial that outputs pulses at just the right speed for his digital telephone line.

BTW, as an experiment, I tried about a month or so ago to to use my touch-tone phones in pulse mode; they dial out with no problems, but I still hear tones in the earpiece while dialing, just as I do with the phone in tone mode. The last time I tried this, I was expecting to hear dead silence, or at least clicks, while entering the number I was trying to reach on the keypad.