I was born in the 80s, thus I still use my phone like a phone.

… And I got a land-line, here’s what those boxes on the outside of your house are for:

Phone line comes in from a splice-case on the pole via an aerial cable, is attached to the side of the house, runs down the pipe, into the Bell Canada NID, (aka “Protector”, “Fuse”, “Demarc”) which is the demarcation between my wiring and the telco’s wiring. From there it’s run into an ADSL/VDSL/xDSL POTS splitter (just a big Z-Filter) and then the twisted-pair cables are run the the various phone jacks and ADSL modem. The little blobs you see are Scotch Locks, which are handle little wire connectors – you don’t even need to strip the insulation off of ’em!

If you live in a apartment building (“MDU”), this video shows what the other end of a DSL line looks like. (It’s a trick though! That’s just the middle, since your dial tone still comes from somewhere else!)