We live in the boonies. We have an exterior antenna on the house that hooks up to a cell phone repeater/booster (not sure what to call it) in the house.
That set up is MORE reliable than our land line that would go down for a week or two every winter when a snow plow would take out a pedestal. We are/where the only people on that particular line. I really felt sorry for the tech that would have to dig that out and try to splice the mess back together.
Anyway, we dropped the land line.
I’m 48 and I haven’t had a landline in almost 10 years. I do pay $5/year to reserve my old number (because, well, I don’t know).
Huh. Didn’t know you could do that.
I had come to hate our landline. One phone in the living room, one in our bedroom, one in my office. All while I’m carrying a cell phone around. It was certainly a necessity for a while, but cell phone coverage has vastly improved. And the external antenna helped a lot.
I should probably port our cell phones through our satellite dish, but am hesitant about that.
My wife has done medical interpretation and immigration court interpretation and both allowed cable-service landlines. You just couldn’t use cellular services.
When I called the police to report a group of teens vandalizing a car, they were able to find me in a very large parking lot (size of many football fields). Unfortunately this also outed me as the snitch to the thugs. Who were not arrested, and marched right over to express their displeasure, so I got into my car and drove off.
How do you do this? I’m interested.
Unless you have FIOS from Verizon. Fibre optic cable doesn’t carry power, you have to have a battery backup – provided by Verizon – which is good for a couple hours.
FIOS isn’t a POTS line.
I stand corrected
My very first cell phone, back in… 2005 or so? Had a built-in GPS, solely for the purpose of 911 calls. So, yeah, that’s been standard for a while now.
i have that sort of landline, too. But I only have it because it costs me less than nothing. Seriously - for some reason, if I drop the phone my FIOS service will cost more, which doesn’t make any sense to me.
We’ve had a copper landline at a summer ‘home’ for almost 30 years - it’s actually in a shed we park a camper next to… we’d periodically say ‘this is a ridiculous expense’ because we’d use it maybe two times a year… Just got a letter from Verizon requesting and requiring us to make an appointment for their installers to bring fiber from the rural roadside, and install a optical networking terminal at our end that will require AC power - at no cost to us, although we are encouraged to pony up to bump it up to FiOS instead of just voice service. The existing copper line runs for 3 pole spans along a private gravel driveway, then goes underground another 200 feet to the shed - about 1200’ feet altogether. I haven’t heard back from the installers how they plan to do this other than a boilerplate FAQ ‘we may run a temporary surface line if conditions preclude immediate burial and landscape restoration’. I think this is going to be fun…
I am 40, my wife is 42. We have not had a landline since 2007.
My parents have an ersatz landline: their house phones are connected to their internet somehow. They do not have phone service from a phone company but they still have the same phone number they’ve had for ~40 years.
I do not know anyone younger than me that has a landline. In fact, the only people I know that have a dedicated landline from the actual phone company are my wife’s parents (both in their 70’s) and I think my wife’s sister and BIL (both in their 50’s).
I have never missed having one and, for us, having one would be completely unnecessary.
I consulted with a Cable service once. If you got the “triple play” Cable, internet and phone" there was a deal that made the phone basically free, in fact you saved about $10 a month getting all three- for the first two years anyway. The phone was a VOIP.
So, yeah, 8% of expenditures? If your family cell bill is $150 a month, and your land line is free or $10, the % would be very low. That doesn’t say no land line exists.
But you would likely turn the ringer off like we did. We still get messages and make an occ call.
It depends on how large and overlapping the cells are. As I understand it, the relative signal strengths are compared. In an urban setting you can be found pretty closely, rural not so much.
When I left Carson City in 1998 there was one, enormous cell tower a couple miles north of town that covered some fifteen miles north and south. There were no other towers nearby to be compared to.
I somehow read the thread title as “Young People with Landmines” and thus assumed that my failure to keep up with modern trends was continuing to worsen.
FRONT
TOWARD ELDERLY
I lost my land line by accident when changing cable companies. Company A offered phone service in their cable, internet, phone bundle, and it was a regular old fashioned standard phone line. This was back when cell phones still rationed your talk time with Peak calling and Night and Weekend minutes, and I had a couple of chatty preteens at home without cell phones, so it was good.
A few years on Company B offered me a better price with faster internet and more channels, so I switched cable companies. Their bundled phone was VOIP, which i didn’t know in advance and had no experience with before. I hated it. It dropped calls, randomly went offline without our knowledge (until someone would call my cell to tell me they couldn’t call the house phone), and was basically horrible and unreliable. We had a two year contract. Ugh. Thankfully, unlimited talk time on cell phones was much more common then, so we rarely used the home phone ourselves, leaving it to the kids.
When the two years were up I called up Company A and asked about switching back, specifically mentioning my hated of the VOIP as the main reason I wanted to leave Company B. They said they would be very happy to switch me over and assured me repeatedly that they had standard, regular, wire from the wall telephone service. The installers also assured me it was “regular, from the wall phone service”.
It was a lie.
And i was in another 2 year contract.
I called up the phone company and asked about getting service from them and they pretty much told me they didn’t offer new service, only took care of people who already had service with them.
So I was stuck with crappy VOIP service or nothing. I unplugged all the phones, threw then out, bought the kids cell phones, and never looked back. (But i still give out my “home” phone number to anyone who insists on a phone number before they’ll check me out at the store. Like many players said above, it’s cheaper to have the phone in the bundle than to cancel it, so we technically still have it.)
Here in Oz a traditional POTS land line is pretty much a thing of the past. The rollout of the National Broadband Network has for the majority of customers compulsorily removed the connection to the POTS infrastructure, which has since been decommissioned.
However vendors of Internet connections are required to bundle a free VoIP service. So everyone gets what looks like a landline. When the cutover occurred you could elect to keep your landline number. There is a special service that provides phone only for those that only want it.
So many households still have what amounts to a landline. For no reason extra cost.
Amusingly for those of us that got a fibre connection to the pit outside our homes, aka fibre to the kerb, it is now the householder that provides power to the fibre termination. Four households share one termination, and so long as one is providing power, it works.
I killed my old landline number (far too much spam) and I have never connected a phone to the VoIP port on the router. So I guess I count as not having a landline although I technically might count as having one. I don’t even know it’s number. (So when the call comes from inside the house, I won’t know.)
Sadly, I don’t think I count as young anymore.
As an old fart…
We switched from the phone company with copper line and DSL, to the cable company and VoIP - for the equivalent cable service at half the price. There were a few hiccups, but… we have an answering machine on our ex-POTS line, and neither of us has bothered setting up a voicemail service on our cellphone. Because work often includes texting most of our external communication involves our cellphones. A minor annoyance was when we switched to VoIP, our caller ID is blank. I don’t know if this is an extra cost, but we’ve never bothered to have it fixed. Maybe it’s convenient to have a line that does not reveal our caller details. (AFAIK, neither name nor number). We need something pretending to be POTS also, because that is how our alarm system communicates with the monitoring company. And it comes bundled, so it’s not an extra cost.
The Bell contractors have been busy pulling underground fiber in our area, presumably to replace the copper for their nifty high speed internet, so I assume copper service is not long for this neck of the woods anyway.
I first encountered “no landline” in the early 1990’s, when a friend of mine moved to an apartment in downtown Toronto and decided to skip installing one, since he and his girlfriend both had cellphones (a significant expense then) and being young and living in a small apartment in a lively area of the city, they were often not at home anyway.