Giving up the land line.

[j]

I gave mine up (with the aquisition of a cable modem for my computer) 2 years ago and have never looked back. This is a great column by Ralph Bristol on this very subject. Join the ranks and tell that phone company to stick it!!

---------------------------------------
Giving up the land line
Source: http://www.ralphbristol.com


It's true that old habits die hard. Every month, I write a check to my phone company for service I rarely use. I talk an average of about 600 minutes a month on my cell phone and maybe 30 minutes on my home phone that's tethered to the wall. When someone first told me that they had cancelled their home phone service altogether and use only a cell phone, I thought that sounded a little too "cutting edge" for me. When I saw the TV commercial featuring the "relic from the past," the phone with a cord attached, I thought they were getting a little ahead of themselves.

Now I'm not so sure. A few weeks ago, I started thinking about the possibility of canceling my home phone service and upgrading my cell phone service. For what I'm paying for the two, I could easily get unlimited service on my cell phone, along with voice mail and any other feature I would ever use. I'm not sure what's holding me back, other than that evasive "unknown."

There's something vaguely uneasy about doing without something that I've had all my life - a phone that plugs into my wall. I can't imagine what perils might befall me if I go cold turkey on the land line, but it's still hard to make that jump.

It would be hardly any trouble at all to notify my circle of friends, family and business associates that I now have only one phone number instead of two. One number should make their life easier. They won't have to decide, "Which number should I use to call Ralph -- his home number or his cell?" When I give people a phone number to use, I won't have to decide which number to give them. I'll have only one.

There's always the chance that I'll lose my cell phone (again) and will have to be without a phone until I get a new one. But that has happened only once and I had a new phone within about 24 hours. So that's no big deal. When the battery goes dead, I can still use it while it's charging, either at home, in the car or the office.

In short, I can think of no good reason to continue to pay two phone bills instead of one, other than that natural hesitation to change.

This is my last step in the decision-making process - to talk it over with you and see if you can think of something I may have missed. Unless you talk me out of it, I'm pretty sure I'm going to do it. I'm going to cut myself free from that communications umbilical cord to which I've been tethered for my entire life.

Speak now or forever hold your peace.

[azsnowman]

We have given it some thought, yes, it's a PAIN in the butt to have to pay for 2 phones (cell and land line) but with our business, we NEED our fax machine.....SO, we have to stay with AT&T

Dennis

[Aquawind]

You can send and recieve faxes via the internet..no modem required..

http://www.download.com/3120-20-0.html? ... search.y=8

[Persepone]

Two reasons to keep the land line--for now, anyway.

First, 911 service. Still not good/reliable on cell phones. If you dial 911 from your home phone, emergency services can find you very quickly... perhaps not from a cell phone. The technology just is not "good enough" yet and the bottom line is that there is a good chance that the emergency folks will not find you as quickly as they would if you made the call from a wired land line.

Second, "reliability" in emergencies. Yes, if a hurricane takes out the lines, all bets are off. However, in many places phone cable is buried and phone service stays up even through major storms. Laws governing land lines require DAYS worth of backup battery. No comparable laws and regulations for cell phones. And as long as you use a "plain old telephone" that does not require you to plug in anything at your house, you get the power for your phone from the phone company, so power can be off and your phone will work. Even if some cell towers are "up and running," your cell phone uses its battery quickly looking for a signal (the weaker the signals from the towers, the more battery gets used looking for them). Yes, you can use your car charger, etc. but...

The laws for reliability of phone service are all based on wired land lines--not cell phones. Further, the same laws will probably never be enacted for cell phones. But the technologies are different! Phone stuff has all sorts of redundancy and backup and all sorts of "old reliable" equipment that results in continuous operation and "failover." With cell phone technology you have something more like computers--where "rebooting" has become acceptable. Think about how many times you reboot your computer and how many times you redial a cell phone call because the signal faded, you drove through a dead zone, etc. and then think about how many times you've had to "reboot" your land line phone or had a call drop in mid-conversation. Maybe normally these things are just an annoyance, but in emergency they can be life-threatening factors.

Note that "cordless phones" and other fancy phones that require local power (something that plugs into the wall other than the phone line itself) will not work when the power is off--just the plain old phones (2500-type).

You can, however, save a lot of money on your landline by getting rid of all the charges for services you don't use much anymore and don't really need if you spend a lot of time on your cell. Get rid of charge for inside wire maintenance charges--you may be paying these and they are virtually useless unless mice chew through wires in your walls frequently. Get rid of any "rental" equipment which you've probably paid for 20 times by now. Go to the store and buy a $10 phone (2500 type). Get rid of call waiting, three way calling, call forwarding, etc. if you don't use these services. The charges for "basic service" are actually very cheap--what drives up your phone bill are the "extras." Get rid of the "extras" and it becomes worth keeping the service for "emergency." Suddenly that $35/month service bill drops to $10/month... If you really, really don't use it, you can probably drop even further by having "limited service" and paying for each call over a small number per month... And no one says you have to use your phone for long-distance calls. Go the store and buy a long-distance calling card! You access long distance with an 800 number.

So save money by rethinking your land line phone needs and scaling back your service if appropriate, but don't relinquish your land line yet!