Woman spends $14,000 for rotary phones from AT&T

Luxury cell phones have been popping up with increasingly stratospheric prices, but even the higher end of noncellular phones is pretty affordable. A sleek Belkin handset that offers Wi-Fi access to Skype costs $189. And VTech's futuristic i5871 retails for $149.95.

But over the past 42 years, an 82-year-old woman in Ohio paid about $14,000 for her two home phones. The phones big features? Cords. And rotary dials.

Mandatory phone rentals went out in the '80s with the Bell antitrust breakup, but the Associated Press reported Thursday that Canton, Ohio resident Ester Strogen kept paying AT&T for her two black rotary phones. She finally stopped this summer, at the request of her two granddaughters who found her whopping rental bills. They also raised the question of how ethical it is to allow longtime telephone service customers, many of them elderly, to pay thousands of dollars for outdated phones.

The AP article did not provide Strogen's response to her bills, but the newspaper's Web site did quote her as saying that she was dissatisfied with her new push-button phone and would "like to have (her) rotary back."