We’re moving soon and I’m considering ditching our telephone landline entirely in favor of cell phones and a cable modem. I’ve crunched all the numbers: counting up how much we spent each month over the past year on the landline, long distance, DSL connectivity, and basic cell phones. I then compared that to the price of an upgraded cell phone plan (enough minutes to cover all our needs and free long distance included) and a cable modem. My preliminary figures suggest we could save about $540 a year this way!
So what’s the catch? Surely if it were this easy, everyone would be doing it…
So, have you scrapped your telephone landline? How well did it work? What potential pitfalls should I look out for?
Emergency services. 911 from a landline shows the operator your address. 911 from a cell phone does not. That may not be a dealbreaker for you, but it’s something to consider.
My wife and I considered ditching the landline, but our tivo needs it. Don’t care if the ambulance can’t find me, but I’ll be damned if I live without my tivo.
I’ve done it, and I find it relatively annoying. I find myself wishing I could just call the house. Instead, I have to call Sis/Roommate’s cell phone, which she often turns off (bonehead).
I’m doing the same thing right now. When I moved, I just never bothered to hook up the landline. I got a cellphone plan that lets me call long-distance in the U.S. It’s great money-wise – after running numbers, I found that I spend about 3 cents per minute on calling. And my particular cellphone does let 911 know where you are.
However, the catches are:[ul]
[li]I can’t have really long telephone conversations, as the battery dies after about an hour or so on the phone. [/li][li]Misplacing the phone causes major amounts of panic.[/li][li]When electricity goes out, I’m unable to recharge (and use, if the battery’s low) the cell phone.[/li][li]People are less likely to call you because they know you have a limit on your cell phone minutes, unlike a landline.[/ul][/li]It has worked for me so far, but it does have its annoyances. I’m planning to get a landline eventually, but not until I’m comfortable spending the money on it.
I’ve killed my landline, and find that the only minor annoyance is that I need to keep the cellphone with me all the time in the house. If I put it down when I’m upstairs, then head downstairs, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll get a call. I wish you could have 2 cell phones on the same number, so you could just leave one phone in, say, the upstairs office/bedroom, and have the other in the kitchen.
I gave up my land line. No one called me there after I got the cell.
They say a cell will not work if the tower is hit with disaster, but so what? I’m not the kind of guy who has to call everyone when the lights go out. And the risk is a lot more speculative than real, as I know I am in a sight line to 3 separate stations along the ridge.
I use cell as my primary phone. We got one of those plans with 2 phones using one bunch-o-minutes and my wife has the other phone. Make sure to get the plan where all your phones can call each other without using minutes. You’ll be amazed how many of your minutes are intra-family.
We still have a landline for the office fax machine which also carries DSL and the satellite TV receiver’s modem, but we almost never use it as a voice phone. If we didn’t absolutely need a fax machine we’d kill that phone line too and either go DSL-only or cable modem if the phone co won’t sell the DSL separately.
In contrast to Earlyout, we bagged the landline precisely because the new house was big enough that even with 6 phones scattered around you’d be sprinting from room to room to find the nearest phone whenever the damn thing rang. That was inconvenient as hell, especially when on the 4th ring it forwarded to voicemail and now I had to make two phonecalls to return one I almost got to in time. AAARGH!
Conversly, my cellphone sits in a charger by my bed and clips onto my PJs when I get up. Pretty soon that little holster just feels like it’s built into my pants. And I never run for the phone anymore; it’s always right there. Very convenient. Diff’rent strokes I guess.
As QN Jones says, it’s a pain in the butt if everyone in the household doesn’t accept that using a cellphone instead of landline means they MUST be as reliable as landline. Its gotta be turned on and they’ve gotta answer it when it rings. That’s just not optional. Unless your family never did that with the landline either.
Make damn sure the cellular coverage is rock-solid at yuor new house. We could never trust our cells to even ring at our old place and most calls got cut off at least once. It would never have been practical to kill the landline at that house. Not a problem at the new locale.
If your new house is within 2 miles of a freeway, make sure to try your cell during rush hour before ditching the landline. I find I’m cut off after about 15 minutes almost every time I’m calling from home during the time our nearby freeway is busy. I suspect our local celltower gets saturated and it hangs up on the longest-running call it has to make room for the next incoming handoff. That’s me, not the folks moving down the highway who leave for the next tower again in just a couple of minutes.
All in all though, I’m happy with cell-only. The hardest part was convincing some relatives that my wife and I had separate phone numbers but still lived together. They had a hard time with that idea.
I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, and I’ve only recently realized a LOT of my friends are doing the same. For me, it works perfectly. I don’t make or receive a lot of long phone calls, so the minutes aren’t a problem. My plan is such that, for an additional monthly charge of $5, calls to and from people on the same service (SprintPCS for me) don’t count against my minutes. By coincidence, most of the people I am in touch with are on Sprint, so I got really lucky in that regard. My phone’s battery life is one of the longest (or was when I bought it) of most phones on the market … about 3-4 hours talk time … I never spend that much time on the phone, and standby time is over a week, so I generally charge it once a week. IIRC, my phone also has a locator function for 911 emergencies. There are so few locations in my city where I don’t get great reception that I’ve nearly forgotten what it’s like to drop a call, but YMMV obviously. Overall, I recommend it without hesitation.
What about VOIP over that cable-internet line? Sounds like the best of both worlds, especially if you make long distance calls frequently and really want a ‘house’ phone.
We have one of those cable internet phones. It’s cheap ($20 flat rate per month with no extra long distance charges in the US), but boy is it awful.
about half the calls we make don’t go through and have to be redialed
many times people try to call us and it never rings
calls disconnect all the time mid-conversation, there is usually an echo on the line and often you only hear 8 words out of 10
the connection itself is awkward with a delay so that you often have to repeat yourself and yell down the line-- as if you were talking on an old fashioned walkie talkie
you often get that fast busy signal when calling out and have to redial again and again
the router has to be reinitialized often to get it to work
voicemail almost always takes more than one try to get, often does not recognize our phone number and/or password
you have to explain to everyone you give your number to locally that they have to dial a 1 first–not a big deal by itself, but still annoying
as someone said, 911 doesn’t work, but there is a 10 digit number that connects you to the same place, so we have it stuck to the phone
when your power goes out (as it did for most of the day today), you have no phone
Maybe all this will improve, but as it is I’d say two tin cans and a string would be preferable.
Hmm, I wonder if this is a specific vendor issue or if the Cisco VoIP router (Packet 8 uses it, no?) sucks. I don’t have any end-user stories about VoIP except for yours, ** koeeoaddi**; I wonder if anyone has had a good experience with it? Maybe I’ll start another IMHO thread to find out.
I have not have a landline phone for about 2 years and I love it. My landline bill was slowly getting more and more (extra fees, etc) while my cell bill was getting less and less.
The only problem I have had with not having a landline is the entry system in my apt complex- they can’t use a cell phone for that and some pizza delivery places use a system that locates the nearest place by the phone number calling. In that case, I just have to call the direct number for the place. Oh, I do have spotty reception in some places of my apt, so I just stand near a window.
I have a cable modem, and it is about the same cost as DSL, but without the added cost of a phone line.
I think ditching the landline phone was one of my better financial ideas.
I don’t have a landline phone, either. If my roommate last year would’ve had a cell, I probably would’ve tried to talk her into having us split a cable modem and not use the phone. I pay as much now as we did last year for our phone service ($45/month), and that didn’t include long distance. I don’t call a whole lot of people (I have 500 anytime minutes. Most of that time I’m at work, which means my phone is off. I have never even gotten close to using them all). A cable modem is way faster than dialup.
If my phone starts dying while I’m having a long conversation, I just plug it into the charger and keep talking.
I started using Vonage with my cable modem about a month ago, but I kept my Bell South land line in case I did not like the service. I have had only 1 short outage in the last month and the quality seems equal to that of Bell South.
Right now I am paying $50 a month for my Bell South Land line and about another 20 a month for IDT LD service. With Vonage I get everything I had with Bell South and 500 LD minutes a month (anything over 500 is .039 a minute). All this for $25. I am having my land line turned off in 2 weeks. I will be saving at least $45 a month. It just makes good sense.
It works good for our house. There are only two of us… and we have two cell phones. One for me and one for her. Her plan has all the minutes and the evenings/weekends and good long distance. My phone is used basicly just to call her I think it might be a bigger issue if you had kids or everyone didn’t have their own phone.
One advantage, i havn’t got a single telemarketer call since getting rid of the landline!
I think it might be a bigger issue if you had kids or everyone didn’t have their own phone.