I had the perfect phone. Sony XZ2 Compact. released in 2018 so not even that old

5" screen. No headphone jack, but I was honestly just glad to have a screen that small. Ran LineageOS like a dream.

Then came the 3G tower shutdown. Now, the XZ2c is capable of 4G LTE calling. Lineage even had the settings option for it unlocked (as opposed to stock). So I call up my carrier and ask them to please enable 4G LTE calling for my phone so that it’ll receive calls again.

Turns out, the major carriers in the US decided not to support 4G LTE calling for the XZ2c. There’s a line of code sitting somewhere that could be flipped to “true” and my perfect phone would work again. But no, fuck me for wanting to resist CONSOOM NOO FONE EVERY SIX MONTH.

Fuck capitalism I’ll never forget what they took from me

bonus:

accidentally turning your kids into Web 1.0 enjoyers lol

In the U.S., according to Census Bureau data, an estimated 163,401 households were using dial-up alone to get online in 2023, representing just over 0.13% of all homes with internet subscriptions nationwide.
(AP News)

As far as US households, looks like not many. Most likely very remote locations. I had also read that some businesses maintain a dial up connection as a backup for broadband outages

https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/network-providers/aol-will-end-dial-up-internet-service-in-september-34-years-after-its-debut-aol-shield-browser-and-aol-dialer-software-will-be-shuttered-on-the-same-day

finally the robots’ true purpose revealed. we created them so we could say more slurs lmao