NO VACUUM TUBES
This little jewel is what we use to communicate with the outside world. Since we have no telephone lines near us, Telefónica (Ptooie!) kindly provided us with this "radio-phone".

This isn't a black-and-white picture. The phone is off-white and is mounted on the garage wall, which is painted white.

It's just a transmitter/receiver that connects to the house telephone wiring just like a normal phone line would and, for voice calls, you hardly know it's there. When you pick up a phone to answer a call, there's a slight delay so you sometimes have to say "Hello" twice before the caller hears you. (We haven't quite developed the habit of pausing after picking up the phone to avoid this.)

Our only real objection to this setup is that it won't handle data transmission at anywhere near the speed you need for the Internet. For a few weeks after we moved here, we were trying to correspond by e-mail at a blazing 1200 BPS! We've since subscribed to a cellular service just for Internet use and are running at 9600 BPS now. Not fast, but it sure beats 1200.

JAN 03 UPDATE: After trying several modems a while back, we found one that will work at 4800BPS with this phone system. It's difficult to make a connection at that speed (averaging 5 dial-up tries) and it sometimes drops out, but it's useable and a lot less expensive than using the cellular phone.

We had to set a couple of browser options to make it practical. Disabling graphics downloading permits reading the text on newspaper websites. Disabling Javascript eliminates most pop-up advertising. What's left are text-only downloads, but they're better than nothing. Someday we may get a phone system that allows us to actually "surf the net."