My Brother Ditched His Landline

I've been w/0 a landline for about 5 years.

Jay

 

I lived without a landline for about 2 years and loved it - I however had VOIP (Vonage) during that time. I have however recently come back to a landline (a stripped down version without any features like extended area calling, call waiting, etc.) just for the 911 capability because I have 2 young sons. If I was single or without kids, I wouldn't give a second thought to ditching a landline.

 

No landline for about four years. Coverage is the first thing I check when considering a hotel or new home.

I can't wait for the studies that show how bad coverage hurts property values much more than the presence of a nearby cell tower.

 

I ditched my landline about 5 years ago and never looked back.

 

I have a landline right now, but it is strictly for DSL. Cable modem serice is horrible where I live. The last time I had a landline that I used was back in 2001. Just the money I save with M2M & long distance is well worth having a cell only.

The only time I would pass on a nice house/place is if their was no cell service period. I would just pay the ETF and move to the company that did have service there. Like I did when I moved into my last apartment, moving from Cingular to Sprint.

 

I ditched my landline in 1999 and have never looked back.

 

i have a land line for puter use only, several years now.

 

I've been wireless only since I left campus over 2 years ago... landline is a tad expensive in my area

 

i've been without a landline for two years but i recently got vonage to cut down the cost of using my cell phone all the time. 25 bux a month for unlimited calls to us + western europe = great deal. highly recommend it if you are trying to avoid nasty cell phone bills.

 

i know for dsl you most be a set distance rom the sub station for land line and some cable dsl and those properties rent and sell faster than ones outside of that area. that is knowledge from working for a rental company

 

I'm not a total mobile freak, but I rely on it heavily for work and so do my co-workers. We are packing up our office and moving tomorrow. One of the big reasons is that our wireless service is poor for both Nextel and Verizon in this building. The other companies are weak too due to zoning and Historic limitations on developing sites. People keep missing calls. It's bad for business.

Bad service might not be having a big impact yet, but it will soon. Here's an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about people giving up their land lines - especially young people:

More U.S. Households Are Ditching Landline Phones for Wireless
By LI YUAN
March 31, 2006; Page A12
U.S. households are increasingly giving up their traditional wired phones in favor of cellphones.
Last year, about 8% of U.S. households that subscribe to cellphone service had given up their land-line phones, up from 5% in 2004 and 4% in 2003, according to a survey to be released today by Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
Households are ditching home wired phones faster because cellphone service is getting cheaper, wireless coverage is improving and fewer people need their land lines for access to the Internet, according to the survey of about 4,500 households with cellphones in the fourth quarter. More than six million households and nearly 6% of the total U.S. population rely exclusively on wireless phones, according to Forrester.
"The cost of using cellphones at all times used to be prohibitive," says Charles Golvin, a Forrester analyst. But now consumers take advantage of plans that offer such features as free calling at night and on weekends and free mobile-to-mobile calling within the same company network. "Cost has become less of a concern," he says.
Forrester also found that cord cutters are getting older. While the practice is still more prevalent among the under-35 crowd, 9% of U.S. mobile subscribers between the ages of 35 and 44 gave up their home phones in 2005, up from 3% in 2004.
Younger cord cutters tend to be more price-sensitive, says Mr. Golvin. They often have to choose between mobile and land line. Older people who gave up their wired phones generally did so after realizing that they didn't use it that often.
In a separate study, 12% of more than 43,000 U.S. cellphone users surveyed in January and February reported that cellphones were their only phone, according to NPD Group, a market-information company in Fort Washington, N.Y. About 42% said that they also have a land-line phone but they use their cellphones most. Only 43% said they still use their land-line phones as the primary phone.
The shift away from land-line phones has been particularly painful for phone companies like AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., which have lost millions of their wired customers. These losses have only partially been mitigated by the large interests that both companies hold in wireless companies.
At the same time, the cord-cutting trend doesn't bode well for telephone companies' high-speed Internet businesses. Households that disconnect their wired phone service are four times more likely to buy broadband service from cable operators than from phone companies, according to the Forrester study. Among those who said they were keeping their land-line phones, 34% cited dial-up Internet access as a reason, down from 43% in 2004 and 47% in 2003.
"The possibility that phone companies can win these customers back is pretty low," says Mr. Golvin. "Cord cutting and cable modems are a killer for them."

 

Been off and on for 5 years. Cell has been my only advertised/primary number the entire time. Only landline use now is for rare computer connections, stupid dish receivers, 800 numbers and such. Never answer the thing.

If/when the Bluetooth docking solutions become more available and functional, that's it. All wireless service is poor in my home and repeaters are too expensive to justify, but if I can get a dock and set the phone where it gets a signal, I'd be golden.

I've read a couple of articles about the things, but PhoneLabs still seems to be the only company with a no frills box. I'd rather find my own phones, and don't need the answering machine or other fluff that the other companies are including in their solutions, just to raise the prices.

I'm just a little skeptical about PhoneLabs. I've read quite a few comments about flakiness, poor support, and charging for firmware fixes! How about just letting customers download and install the fix themselves?

Dan

 

I haven't had a landline since 1996.

But I'm not the norm. Even now, I hardly if ever go over 200 minutes peak...

I did without a phone for 2 years once. I'm usually never home.

Only reason I would need a landline is if I get a service like DirectTV and have more than 1 box (because they need to be connected to the same phone line). But it would be local service only, no regional toll or long distance.

 

I have Dish network and don't have a phone line to it, and never had a problem.

 

You need the phone line to order PPV stuff.

 

Your right, I forgot about that. I just never order PPV's, so I don't have a problem with not having a land line.

 

Yeah, I don't either. Actually, I haven't turned the TV on in about a month. I downgraded my DISH subscription to the lowest option available - $19.99/mo for a handful of channels. Even that is a waste for me - maybe I should punt it altogether.

 

Coverage risk

I have learned on these forums that carriers will often "detune" a tower when they install a new one nearby, which means if your home has good coverage now it might have bad coverage next month. A few months after I moved to my house, my Verizon coverage became marginal. If you pay a termination fee to switch carriers just to cover your house you are taking a risk.

Handsets

I don't know how other people deal with it, but one reason we have a home phone is the ability to have extensions all around the house. I can't reliably reach my wife on her cell phone because it could be in a different room and she might not hear it. It might even be in her car! I've even lost a cell phone before, so it seems only sensible to at least have another phone around.

Reliability

Cell phones still are less reliable than landlines because there is more transport equipment that can fail and less capacity. I'm in a college town, so the very days I might need to make an emergency call could be the game days when we have an extra 50,000 people in town jamming up the cell systems. Can you send a text message to 911? No.

Phonebook listings

I'm still hearing about people running their businesses completely from cell phones, which means they don't have a white pages listing -- maybe a yellow page ad, but not a regular listing. I'm more likely to call a company that is obviously stable enough to have its own permanent office with a staff. Any business without a white pages listing is likely to be run out of a guy's house or truck with no one to take my call while he is busy. Of course, it depends on the type of business, but this is a marketing issue.

Just a few things to think about. I would like to ditch a telecom provider myself, either the landline or the cell phone.

 

You have made some good points, but I do not think it would be in a carriers best interest to detune a tower with the risk of losing customers.
Everybody's circumstances are different, I have not had a landline phone for almost 6 years and never missed it. Those with Families may have the need for it more as a comfort because yes they are somewhat more reliable and I admit we do have to catch up with wireless phones in some areas.
I also do not think a person's credibilty to run a business would be based on whether or not he has a landline phone and a white pages listing,believe or not I once saw an ad online that a business completely ditched the landline phone and ran their
business wireless through Sprint and gave all their employees wireless phones to communicate with each other more easily.
And how many times have you called a business and actually spoke with a live person without having to go through a million prompts or worse yet get a voicemail to leave a message.
Just my 2 cents here, we are entering a new age where everything will eventually become wireless but there are still those who are reluctant to move forward or they are the NIMBY'S.

 

In some countries, you can text message 911. for example, Philippines. Having a landline has many advantages but I still prefer my cellphone. I can carry it anywhere and it costs less.

 

You can order PPV on the web: DIRECTV.COM
If you register online.

 

My understanding was 911 calls are given the highest priority on the network, so if anything a 911 call would be the call to go through.

 

That is my thinking too.

 

One thing you can't do is make a collect call to a cell phone.

The hospital I work for doesn't have patient phone billing set up (fr individual outgoing calls), so any call that is regional or long distance (non local) hasto be made collect or calling card.

I hate having to tell ppl, that even though the person they are tryng to call lives locally, their cell phone is based many towns away.

 

I have received a collect call on my cell phone. They take down your address and then charge you an arm and a leg. They charged me $40 for an 8 minute call....plus tax to bring it up to a nice round $50 !

 

Ouch...I guess you'll never accept another one

 

Even though I use the cell phone more than the landline, I don't consider cell service reliable enough to be the only phone. Landline is cheap, and I have to have it for the computer. I have to have the cell phone because the computer ties up the landline, and it's important to be reachable at all times. I would not want to move somewhere where there was no cell phone reception. I guess I am a cell phone freak

 

I have broadband...and where I live there are plenty of open WAPs (Wireless Access Points) to mooch off of