Verizon sent me a postcard last seek.

They say they miss me.

How much do the folks who coined the advertising slogan “can you hear me now” in 2002  miss me?

Verizon is willing to pay me $50 to join them again.

Apparently, they didn’t miss me that much.

Frontier gave me $200 to welcome them into my home.

Plus they guaranteed the price for two years.

We’re talking fiber optic Internet service.

What brings this up is they’re back.

Who?

Verizon,

Well, not exactly yet, but likely by year’s end the California Public Utilities Commission will likely bless Verizon’s proposal to buy the Frontier landline business in California.

The deal involves landlines in Manteca, Ripon, and Lathrop.

If you were born after 1990, landlines are telephones plugged into the wall.

No, your Samsung or Apple aren’t landlines just because you plug then into a wall outlet to charge them.

In fact, it’s bizarre that we even refer to them as a phone.

Most people use smartphones as a phone per se to call someone else who is human and actually talk to them about as often as they use them as doorstops.

They are cameras, flashlights, calendars, watches, televisions, thermometers, credit cards, calculators, video camera, stock market tickers, radio, and notebook. They also allow you to text and upload cat videos to the Internet among other things.

You can even use them to read books.

Verizon in 2015 bought GTE that had bought ConTel in the early 1990s.

ConTel was the landline provider when I moved to Manteca in 1991.

Pagers were the rage back then as cell phones were still in their infancy. Flip phones did not hit the market until 1996.

ConTel’s business office was next door to the Manteca Bulletin in the 500 block of West Yosemite Avenue.

You could  pay your phone bill there.

The exchange, where the switching equipment is located to connect local customers with long distance, was on Center Street next to the Manteca Library. It is where the local exchange still is today.

ConTel service cost $24.95 a month back then.

There were various state and federal charges and fees that pushed the total close to $30.

Then there were the long distance charges.

Up until the late 1980s, it was a long distance charge to call Modesto, Stockton, or Tracy.

It cost 15 cents per call, before then, to reach either city calling from Manteca.

Longer distance calls were more expensive.

The charges in the 1980s were cheap compared to what Ma Bell charged back a two decades or so prior.

You could spend around $10 if you made an hour or so long call to San Francisco.

Today, using your wireless provider, it would be covered by the basic monthly charge.

It cost roughly $45 a month for cell service.

That’s $15 or so more than the basic monthly phone service charge back in 1991.

Toss in a household’s normal long distance usage back then, and you were right around $45 a month.

That means the cost of “phone” service is basically the same as it was 34 years ago with one big exception — a large number of us could be on the phone talking 24 hours all month along without paying more.

Back before the federal government supposedly saved us all from the Bell System’s monopoly — Ma Bell is now AT&T — you would have had to rob a dozen banks to cover such a monthly phone tab.

Basically, we are getting a lot more phone service for the same amount of money a typical household paid in 1991.

Granted, we have to pay for a phone.

And given the age we are living in, they have to be smartphones.

That can set you back $19.99 to $49.99 a month for the more popular smart phones, or “zero” if you go for the stripped down models as part of multiple year service contracts.

Keep in mind that a smartphone reduces the basic black ConTel push button phone tethered to the wall into the archaic equivalent of a 1900 wall mounted crank phone on a four-party line.

What was a four-party line?

It meant there were four households on every phone line. And it meant, the other three households could eavesdrop.

It was always a concern when you were making a call.

Today, of course, a lot of people want complete strangers to hear their phone conversations.

It’s the only explanation why people have their smartphones on speaker mode and talk as if the person on the other end is a 110-year-old whose hearing is on the fritz. And they do so in the middle of a crowd, a movie theater, or a sit-down restaurant.

A lot has clearly changed since Manteca Telephone extended service into the surrounding countryside after the turn of the 20th century. That’s when they strung phone lines partially along fences.

In 1960, 82.9 percent of Californians had landlines.

The CPUC said that had dropped to 35 percent in 2024.

That means 10.6 million Golden State residents still have landline phone service.

There are 19.2 million Californians, or 64.2 percent of the population using only cell phones.

Clearly, there is still a market for landlines.

The odds are a lot of new households in Manteca, Lathrop, and Ripon won’t be signing up for landline service.

And most people who have gone cold turkey and use cell service exclusively, aren’t likely  going to go back.

I went that route in 2008.

I’m clearly not interested, even if Verizon misses the days I was a landline customer of theirs when they were in Manteca the first time. It isn’t going to happen even if they offered me $200 and a two year price guarantee.

That said, it’s highly doubtful Verizon would be buying Frontier’s local phone exchanges in California if they couldn’t make a tidy profit.

Frontier does serve a lot of fairly rural areas in California where cell service is more than spotty.

Who knows?

Maybe, Verizon has something up its sleeves for a use of the wires they are acquiring.

The world’s come a long way since Alexander Bell’s day and even back in 2015 when Verizon last owned the switching equipment in Manteca that’s housed at 430 West Center Street.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com