Plus, when my home phone rings, I can pick up any phone in the house. Many times I just drop my cellphone on the dresser when I get home and it basically gets ignored.

Whenever I try to call someone outside of business hours, I try to call their home phone first if they have one. I guess this is because I had a cellphone back when minutes and plans were expensive and I hated when people would call me on it.

Plus, when I want to call one of my married friends, I can just call and speak to whoever picks up.

Keep in mind that countless businesses, as well as the government, DEPEND on cellular networks. They cannot get along with this service. For this reason alone (businesses lose money when they can’t talk on the phone), cellular service would be restored quickly in the event of an emergency.

We don’t live in the stone age.

My wife and I got rid of the landline over five years ago and have never regretted it. I can count on one hand the times it would have been “nice” to have, but it’s never been necessary.

You can also cut by removing additional services you may not need such as extra minutes, texts, ect.

We switched to cell-only in 2001 when we moved across the country. We were perfectly happy with it until we discovered two things: DirecTV required a line to dial out on and we had a terribly unreliable tower near our house. So we bought the 500 min $15 Vonage package (which DirecTV didn’t have any problems calling out on, btw), and haven’t looked back. Vonage lets you register your location on the web site for e911. I will say their customer service can be intolerable, so if you have a testy ISP, it can be trying. But we have been thrilled, and have moved our number across the country with us simply by plugging in the box.

I have also never had a problem with calling 911 from my cell, the few times I have had to do it. Once or twice, it routed to a nearby city’s switchboard, but one of the first things I do is tell them I’m calling from a cell so they can re-route me to the proper city. And, I figure that if we have an disaster big enough that the cell service is down, my priorities won’t likely be on making phone calls until I’m somewhere that I could use a landline. Even my 200+ person office is strictly VoIP these days.

For this reason, I stick to a cheap prepaid phone. My option was Virgin Mobile Canada. The nice thing is that I only have to put a bit of money ($15) into my account every 6 months to keep my phone number active. The nice part is that I can’t get any nasty surprises at the end of the month: I can only spend what I put on the phone.

For my long-distance calling, I have found a nice option: jajah.com. It is a European-based company that allows me to make phone-to-phone calls via the internet. Skype would be nice, but many of the options that available to American customers are not available here in Canada as someone noted in a previous post.

As Izabelle said, how on earth did y’all manage before there were cellphones?!? LOL

“Oh, it’s your router”
“Oh, it’s your local ISP”
“Oh, the computer must be taking up bandwidth”
“What? What? I can’t hear you. What?”
“No, I didn’t get your message”
“Yes, I was home all the time, the phone never rang”

We switched back to a landline, offered in a bundle with cable and Internet for $99, plus unlimited national long distance from our town-owned and operated power/cable/phone company. The phone always works, stays up when the power is down, voice quality is crystal clear, we got to keep our number, etc.

The land line infrastructure in the US is top notch and must provide service under severe conditions. Cell phones and Internet phones do not. Also, cell phones and Internet phones have crappy call quality. It’s obvious to the caller that you aren’t on a land line when you call.

A phone is something I want to “just work”. I have little interest in making another center of hassle to deal with.

A way to “plug in” your cell phone at home, have it connect to the house phone wires and allow you to use your regular land-line phones with your cell phone?

That way, when you are home, you can use a land line phone in each room. When it rings, it rings in each room.

You might even be able to set aside a dedicated cell phone at home for that specific purpose.

Is there any technology on the market that does this?

Between the both of them my cell phone bill is about $45/month. It saves me $10/month over AT&T and I have unlimited minutes now.

We got barraged by telemarketers constantly even when we were on the Do Not Call list. My friends and family called our cellphones and we barely used it for outbound calls.

I thought “Wow, I am paying $50/ month to be annoyed by telemarketers.” We canceled the landline and I couldn’t be happier.

Tim Rosanelli
timrosanelli.blogspot.com
60situpschallenge.blogspot.com

The only thing I worry about is the emergency+babysitter+no electric scenario. Given that we’ve yet to have a babysitter at our house, though… no problem.

I have a barebones cell plan with Verizon that only costs me $18/month for service, plus usage charges. We’ve managed to keep the total bill a bit below $30 most months (sometimes well below) since we only use the cell rarely, though usage has crept up from time to time, and I need to revisit whether a prepaid plan would help.

At first we ignored the extra phone line because my cell bill had many, many minutes (over what the company paid for), but after doing the math and carefully examining our call usage, I realized how much I could save by switching to another plan (Sprint SERO, $30/month) and switching back to the land line which we already had.

I now have a land line, my cell which is still paid for by the company, and I got my wife a Net10 prepaid phone. It’s on automatic payment so we don’t have to search for phone cards every month, and 150 minutes (more than she uses) is only $16.05 after taxun.

We are now paying less overall but I forget how much less (sorry, it’s late or I’d be more precise). And given that Sprint’s reception is ugly in the house, it’s nice to have a land line to fall back on. If I have to make a long distance call I wait until 7pm or the weekend, or just make the occasional call in the day, or I use an old Sam’s club card that I bought almost 10 years ago which I keep refilling. 3 cents/minute with a small recharge fee, not too bad but one of these days I’ll do the math to see if that’s costing me.

Great article, just remember that everyone’s situation was different; in our case, it wasn’t cheaper to drop the land line.

Our cell phones are important. My husband is required to have one for work and gets some reimbursement from them for the expense. I have my beloved (free) BlackBerry and we both have 5 favorite numbers for free (spouse and kids basically plus at least one other).

We don’t have phone service at our country home so use the cells there always anyway, plus I can get all my emails, read blogs and post via Blogger all from my BlackBerry. (The nearest free wifi is 20 minutes drive and to install satellite hispeed would be $35 per month when we’re only there a few days per week.)

The landline was useless anyway. Everybody calls us on the cells except for the telemarketers and getting rid of them is going to be a big perk! The 911 issue doesn’t affect us because we share the city house with an adult child and her family has a landline. In an emergency we could use that.

In the case of an emergency i’ve used my cell phone to call 911, but i’ve realized that if the power fails even the cell towers, alot of people wouldn’t have use of a landline because so many phones these days require electricity to use them anyways.

There are two things that bother me about not having a land line. The first (as previously mentioned) is alarm monitoring, and the second is that people expect you to have a land line, and a lot of online forms require you to fill in that field before they’ll let you submit (I just fill it with 0′s, but it still annoys me!)

I agree with Jackie about the emergencies. Who are you going to call? Maybe you’d want to call your folks to let them know you’re OK, but other than that what good is a phone in that kind of emergency?