A friend of mine recently decided to remove her land-line completely and rely solely on her cell-phone (I, myself, think this was due to the sudden ‘love of product’ she sometimes gets when she gets something new and shiney, but that’s neither here nor there). She didn’t think about the fact that, by removing her land-line, she’s lost her DSL at home. She’s looking for alternatives. Obviously, cable is a possibility. In the Chicago-suburb area, (or further out) does anyone have any particular likes / dislikes / reviews of service packages that might be available for her to get back online from her home without having a land-line phone?
Are any data services (such as EV-DO or EDGE) available on her cellular account?
If she’s got cable TV, then cable data service would be the most logical choice.
Failing that, put the land line back in with the cheapest possible voice service. The phone cmpany may or may not be willing to reinstate the DSL line as what’s called “naked” or “dry loop” with no voice service on it, and that may or may not be cheaper than a normal line with bare-bones voice service.
As someone who lives in the same area and went through a similar situation, here is what I did. I originally went with cable to find out that the option at my apartment was dismal (think twice as expensive as Comcast and dial-up download speeds). I looked into DSL, but found that I could only get it if I had a recognized phone line in my apartment.
After costing it out, I found that it was roughly the same price to get DSL and add a no-frills phone line as it was to have Comcast at my last place. My phone has no long distance, no added crap, no anything. In fact, we keep the ringer off 100% of the time and rarely, if ever, call out on it.
Comcast, when I had it, charged about $45 a month for cable internet and the speeds were fantastic. SBC Yahoo DSL costs about $42 a month including the added phone line and, while the speed isn’t nearly as fast as Comcast, at those levels you hardly even notice.
Weird. I have DSL and got rid of my phone service years ago in favor of a cellphone. Unless you physically remove the land line, I don’t think it’s a big problem. YMMV depending on the anal-retentiveness of your DSL company…
As a FCC imposed term of it’s merger with Bell South, AT&T has agreed to sell what it calls a “Dry Loop” or “Naked DSL”. This is DSL without phone service. It also just lowered the price but you may in fact find it’s cheaper to do as interface2x suggests and just don’t use the line.
I have DSL without land line phone service. It costs a little more than DSL would with phone service (we pay $35/month when it’s $20/month with a land line,) but since we have no land line, we obviously do save money, since that would be another $30-$50 a month.
I do the Comcast cable computer/tv/telephone package. One drawback is that I don’t have a phone if the cable goes out, but that can be remedied with a cell phone. Some day I may actually get one!
It’s gone out a couple times in the last year. If you MUST have a phone at all times, get a back-up.
Two or 3 years ago I went all-cellphone, and wanted to drop my Verizon land-line phone service. I balked when they told me I needed phone service to keep my DSL, so I asked them how much a phone service would cost that didn’t include long distance service, local service, couldn’t receive incoming calls, and couldn’t make outgoing calls. I think they thought I was insane, but it sounds like now maybe the phone companies are wising up.
For the record, I ended up dropping them entirely and getting cable internet.
–KidScruffy