I haven't seen a real landline in a very long time. All the supposed "landline" connections in people's homes just turn out to be VoIP connections terminating in their internet router and masquerading as a traditional telephone landline.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Even if you use an honest-to-god land line how long is the distance your call has to travel before its running on the same fiberoptic lines as the internet?
Not far. Most ISPs have upgraded their copper backbone nets to fiber.
They should really upgrade the audio quality, phone calls sound so bad still...
Audio compression is the responsibility of the application developer not the network utility.
Fair point. I was just thinking of landlines provided by ISPs with their phone packages. Still, surely we can do better?
Good question. I would imagine if you have pots service running to your building you probably have a connection that continues in copper.
I would venture to say it varies by state/municipality but, I'm not aware of how isp's do their outside plant cabling for pots lines.
yep, recent phone&internet upgrade came with a phone notch right in the router
Rural areas tend to have them, my parents still do
It is shown that the Red Pills of Io are able to use mirrors to not only enter and exit the Matrix, but also as fast travel portals between two locations inside the Matrix.
Also, the version of the Matrix we see in the original trilogy is perpetually set in the 90s. The phone are kept as part of the design because letting the Red Pills escape the Matrix helps the stability of the rest of the system. They are basically letting the people who resist exile themselves, and every now and then they roll out bug fixes to reduce the amount of outliers.
the exiters evaporate themselves from the cup that is the matrix
Wait, what?
The mirrors work as in-Matrix point to point portals?
I thought the only thing close to that is... the 'maintenance hallways', the certain specific literal doors that work as portals only with specific keys.
To the best of my memory, a mirror as a point to point portal doesn't happen in the OT, nor the Animatrix.
That also didn't even happen in MxO, the Matrix Online, to the best of my memory... though the canonicity of all that is now essentially... either totally disregarded, or exceptionally complicated.
The rest of what you've said is basically correct... but... I do not recall any instance in the OT era stuff of using a Red Pill / Mirror to travel within the Matrix.
MxO handled that by using Pay Phones and I think a few special landline phones as basically fast travel points/hubs.
Is there... an offical comic I'm missing, maybe?
Am I not remembering this happening in Matrix 4?
...
Also uh, potentially worth mentioning...
A Red Pill / mirror is not actually strictly required to exit the Matrix, as per the Animatrix and I think some other canon.
A few individuals, the Kid, the sprinter from World Record...
...they believe so strongly that... their world is not real, that they are not bound by its rules... that they actually 'self-substantiate'...
...they pull themself out of the Matrix, or... cause their local experience of it to crash, w/e, and they then wake up in the pod.
...
Also also, what the Red Pill actually does is act as a traceroute to your actual, physical location in the real world, so you can be recovered by a hovership crew.
Its just that red vs blue pill is also used in a less literal, more colloquial sense to refer to those ready to leave the Matrix, vs those who are not.
The mirror thing is exclusive to the Analyst's version of the Matrix that we see in Resurrections. "Io" is their new home after Zion was destroyed. When I say "Red Pill" I'm taking about individuals that have woken up from the Matrix. People who refused the red pill are nicknamed Blue Pills for obvious reasons, and those that are unaware they are in the Matrix are referred to as Copper Tops.
I wasn't referring to Neo's experience of exiting the Matrix for the first time. I think there was an interview with one of the Wachowskis that implied the liquid mirror was just Neo's reality bending experience. Other people may experience different types of hallucinations, and even other people in the room may not see what their hallucination is. They are probably just observed to fade out into code like when they use a telephone.
The mirror thing is exclusive to the Analyst's version of the Matrix that we see in Resurrections. "Io" is their new home after Zion was destroyed.
Ah!
Ok, ok, that makes sense... I have not committed the 4th movie to memory anywhere near as much as I have with the OT era stuff.
I think there was an interview with one of the Wachowskis that implied the liquid mirror was just Neo's reality bending experience. Other people may experience different types of hallucinations, and even other people in the room may not see what their hallucination is. They are probably just observed to fade out into code like when they use a telephone.
I remember that as well, and I agree that your minor extraploation at the end seems likely.
...
I appreciate you expanding on the details I forgot =P
...
Though I would add that the Animatrix shows that the uh, exiting the Matrix phenomenon... may be different for self-substantiators... the Kid is reported as dead after his 'leap of faith'.
IIRC, there are scenes of an actual funeral? His parents mourn him as dead? Its a whole local news phenomenon that he 'suicided'?
It could be that his uh... Matrix-physical? body did not evaporate into code...
...or it could be that the Matrix / the Agents executed an elaborate coverup, that the Kid's 'body' did 'code evaporate', and they just whipped up a doppleganger body and gaslit/intimidated the hell out of any witnesses of the body 'evaporating', faked all the media coverage, etc.
Interesting. Perhaps your original image stays behind as a dead body, and jacking in is a more ethereal connection. Or maybe it takes a while for the system to recognise your not in your pod and treats you as a natural death.
I... I don't know.
It could go either way?
Like uh... if you go with more of the 'your local connection to the Matrix.exe has crashed' intepretation...
In video games, you'll sometimes get a player character who is badly lagging that just uh, freezes, or gets stuck in some nonsense continuous repetiton of their last valid inputs...
???
...
The Kid actually permanently gets out, and is recovered, ends up in Zion.
Not sure what happens to his 'body'.
The sprinter does not get out, his 'body' does remain.
The sprinter basically runs so fucking hard that he ... well his 'hallucination exit experience' is that he sort of... runs through the code of the matrix itself, which collapses around him... then he wakes up in the pod, then a machine comes up to him and basically zaps the fuck out of him, and he blacks out.
Meanwhile, while that is going on in the real world...
In the matrix, he basically either flatlines or goes into a coma, and its kinda like the video game analogy, his digital avatar just ragdolls and tumbles across the finish line in a very grotesque manner... but he does win that World Record...
Then, he later wakes up, in the Matrix, in a hospital, mostly paralyzed, seemingly brain damaged... but he has moments where ... he remembers this reality is all bullshit, and... can again transcend his 'Matrix-physical' broken body... and walk out of his wheelchair, I think even levitate.
...
So... maybe put that all together, and if you self substantiate, the code evaporation thing doesn't happen, because that effect is some kind of intrinsic to whatever the humans of Zion are Io are using to literally hack you out of the Matrix?
In MxO, you functionally had a 'mage' class by way of all the various 'Hacker' skill trees and branches.
The way thats depicted is uh... instead of punching or shooting someone... they just make hand motions like they are typing, a hologram of a keyboard appears, and then your opponent suffers some debuff, with similarly styled 'code stream' effects on them.
You know the joke, if people had wings we wouldn’t fly because we’d consider it exercise? That, but with escaping the Matrix and landlines. You can still go pay your phone company to activate one… just nobody does.
Traditional POTS service in the US is pointlessly expensive. The infrastructure is owned by legacy companies like Lumen, which have long since given up doing anything but sitting on their dead ass and collecting rent. Lumen was probably the most infuriating company I ever had to deal with B2B.
Lumen Corporation has done a lot! like inventing the severance procedure.
It's Lumon. Which is actually a Finnish glass company. It's pretty funny driving past their office to work
Callcentric is a good VoIP provider if you want that landline experience
What really bothers me is that when a person is recalled with the payphone, they just let the handset drop and leave an empty tone. This is inconvenient for others who want to use the phone.
HACK THE PLANET!!!!!
I hate cell phones, so I still have a landline. It may only ring every other week. It is glorious.
On the plus side, internet cable hubs you can patch right into on every corner. Sometimes several.