Telephones

The telephone shelf was the corded sets, kept separate from the cordless systems. A corded phone draws its talk power from the phone line. The ringer and the dial work in a power outage as long as the line is a traditional landline and not a box that needs house current.

If the house phone service comes from a cable modem or a fiber terminal, that terminal has to have power, often from a battery the installer left in the basement. A corded phone cannot talk through a dead terminal. The handset cord and the line cord are different: the coiled one goes to the handset, the straight one goes to the wall. A buzzing handset with no dial tone is often the straight cord in the wrong jack on the back of the set, where a second line or an answering port is labeled.