Asking on the basis of ORD-FRA/FRA-ORD 772 flights and for my own curiosity...

I thought the Airfone network was completely defunct as of 2009ish and I haven't noticed airfone handsets on board in at least that long. Googling seems to support this.

But on both recent (pmUA) 772 flights I spent the majority of my time in row 33 staring at Airfone handsets on the lav walls; they appeared to be powered on. Given the fact that these cabins were basically time capsules from pre-2011 (plenty of appearances of the Tulip logo, and on one of them, the phone even had the GTE logo -- and GTE ceased to exist in 2000 after becoming Verizon.

All of the seatback phones disappeared were blanked long ago -- so I'm curious if these are some vestigial life form that has escaped extinction but serves no function or if there's still support for voice calls from the air.