THERES NO SCAPE rule

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.
- 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.
  
  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

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.
  
  Callcentric is a good VoIP provider if you want that landline experience

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.
- 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 exiters evaporate themselves from the cup that is the matrix

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.

I hate cell phones, so I still have a landline. It may only ring every other week. It is glorious.

HACK THE PLANET!!!!!

On the plus side, internet cable hubs you can patch right into on every corner. Sometimes several.