How Soon Will Your Landline Be Obsolete? - Comments Page 1

I've mentioned this before, I use Verizon Home Phone Connect for my home phone. For about $23 I have a home phone, which I like (we still have our smart phones). When we moved from CA to TX we just plugged the phone into the outlet and all was good. And, now we can tell who the spam callers are as they're calling the CA number.

I have four land-line phones, and an answering machine.
For a few years, I had DSL on the line. Now I have a fiber, so my landline is superfluous.
But the weak cell connectivity and power-fail issues have kept me from getting serious about dropping the copper. And I'm too lazy to figure out the options. (Thanks, Bob! This article helps.)

I left Bell Canada several years ago and went with Ooma. Our cable company phone service is not economical at all! The basic Ooma service does not port your existing number ($40 charge) or offer free long distance and other services so I went with their premium which ports the number at no charge and provides voice mail, a pseudo second line, unlimited USA and Canada long distance for $10 per month. With taxes and fees that is about $14 which beats Bell's $48 per month which was for two lines. It has worked well. Power failure? I have it connected to a backup power supply and my cable modem is connected to another backup power supply so I would still have internet and phone if the power goes out. I bought two of their wireless handsets that work with the Oooma device. If the Ooma device ever quits I am going to take a close look at their latest offering and if that is not to my liking I will check out Google.

I was an Ooma customer for almost eleven years, but the monthly fees (taxes?) had finally crept up to just under $6/month. I switched to Google Voice using the $50 Obihai box from Amazon, and could not be happier. Faxing is supposed to work just fine on it, and I can't tell any difference in call quality. Their free extra features you can tweak- call blocking, voicemail, forwarding, etc. are very extensive. Totally free is always good, however not mentioned in the article is that you cannot directly port your home number to Google Voice. They only port cellular numbers. So I first ported my number to a spare cell phone using Boost Mobile ($10 for a month- free Sim card), then two weeks later ported it again to Google Voice, who charges $20 for the porting. Total charges then to switch from Ooma to GV were $70- I'll break even in a year.

I switched everything to Magic Jack many years ago and then slowly moved over to smart phone service only. The beauty was simply letting MJ take messages and then informing anyone we cared about that we had moved on from our so called "landline" to our new cell numbers. It would have been easier to simply port the numbers to the smart phones but nobody thinks that far ahead. I still keep a MJ number for callers I really don't actually want to get to me directly :-) Works great. I get an email with a voice mail message and I control the call back. Also MJ is so reasonable (cheap) that its easy to justify.

Since I can no longer travel about the US and Canada I wanted to switch from Verizon to a less expensive carrier. Consumer Cellular looked great until I included costs to call/text with our daughter in Canada. I checked OpenSignal; AT&T and T-Mobile looked as good as Verizon. Recently our apartment was provided with a Google Nest Hub Max. Once our daughter added the Google Duo app to her tablet we've been using Google for video calling - no charge. If it weren't for the frequent texting a switch to CC would be a good choice.

I still have a POTS landline from AT&T. California hasn't allowed AT&T to discontinue landline service. That probably won't change anytime soon, because in the last few fire seasons landlines mostly worked but the cellular infrastructure failed during power outages.

I have a landline, a VOIP cable based landline and a cell phone. So I usually have good voice/Internet connectivity (I can use my cell phone as a hot spot when the cable Internet service doesn't work).

I think there is nothing Plain about copper wire telephone service. Better voice quality and high reliability of service are its hallmarks. I keep my landline, and gave my second number to my mobile phone. I hope that all those other services tied to the copper wire service make it essential to stay in service. One friend was switched to VOIP when seeking a different rate plan, switched without knowing it until after the fact. The voice quality was very bad, could not understand voices, and finally my friend called to have the service put back on copper wires. I think two systems can be useful; they certainly are different.

I switched BACK from VOIP to a copper wire landline just last week, so my 'trend' is quite different!! I live in California and am a customer of AT&T. However, the bundled internet service provided by AT&T in my urban neighborhood is terrible and there are no other options available to me (other than satellite). So, when I subscribed to and installed "Home Internet by T-Mobile" last February, internet speed and reliability increased by a factor of 10!! After comparing both services for 3 months, I finally terminated my AT&T internet service and ordered a standard 'old' POTS landline. Of course, nobody else goes 'backward' like that, so AT&T had to scramble to figure out how to write up such an order!! Today, I have a reliable, quality copper wire landline and fast internet.

In California they switch off the power in high fire risk times to keep people safer ... but that is just when we need to get information on how close a fire is and whether we get out NOW or if it is safe to stay. Our VOIP phone is useless without power.

We cannot get a land line. The local provider claims they have no copper cable in our neighborhood.

We had to buy cellphones and sign up for a service we don't use just to be safe in the summer. After several days of no power the phones can only be charged in the car.

Yes, it is very scary.

Bob - One thing you didn't mention. VoIP includes long distance (US only). Several years ago, in attempt to lower my bill, I switched my POTS service to a local calling plan. Long distance calls could not be placed from the phone. The price continued to rise and I switched to MagicJack which cost $39 A YEAR compared to $30 A MONTH (and rising). Used all the same RJ-45 equipment in the house. I'm very happy with the service.

great ideas and suggestions, but the way things are going now, we wont have need for phones of anykind, there wont be anyone to call!!!!

I have a landline connected to my ISP. For a cell phone, I have QLink, which provided a free phone and charges nothing as long as I use it once a month, which I do for long distance and take with m e for emergencies like calling AAA. I hate the damned thing because it's so hard to hit the right spot to dial a number. Give me buttons any old day!
Arthritis is a bitch!

Hope I'm not understanding something: I live on an island that has copper wire service over one channel to land. My internet (medium speed, Century Link) goes over that connection. Never heard of fiber as an option in my sparsely populated land.

So what happens if copper is cut? For my place, still a cable under water would probably be very expensive. Century Link charges $100/mo (includes land-line) but is not noted for generosity.

Satellite TV also over $100/mo and messy to deal with. I gather sat. phone services barely exceeds dial-up. Been there, done that. Ugh!

Thanks, Bob! I still have my landline. Use it for my internet. However, I can plug in my landline phone whenever I need it. I have never trusted Big Tech, power-hungry weirdos in Silicon Valley. Most of them are foreign nationals and hate Americans, as well as anyone in the world who wants freedom. They are control freaks, and need to be reigned in, regulated and forced to operate like utility companies. Those lunatics have destroyed free speech. What next? Those goons need to be taken down, before they control the world along Communist China.

I bought a Magic Jack years ago and never connected it. Is it difficult to do? I am tired of Verizon's home phone and internet plan. All they have here is DSL and it's painfully slow. I'm paying $70+ for this crap.

"With a Google Voice account, you get [...] even automatic transcription of voicemail messages to text."

Anybody else find this creepy?

Live in California ATT FORCED me to abandon POTS. And it's a nightmare - ATT could give me at BEST a 15meg speed in good weather, and 10-12 megs in rain or wind - but I had to subscribe to their highest speed for this area to get those speeds. I switched to Comcast (the ONLY other service here) and now I get about 100 megs but with a 20ms ping. Comcast goes down in power outage (even with generator) - I also have ATT a housemate will share in power-outage - it works kinda OK, and still works if I run a generator (~$100 a day). We live in a radio shadow (think small steep canyon) to start with - add an aluminum roof and a 2/3 underground house and cell becomes impossible - most visitors have to walk up the hill about 1/2 mile to get 1 or 2 bars on a good day.

Spending several hundred or more on a smart phone is hard on a retirement budget - add in service plans, and it's even more difficult. Being Mid 70's and pushing 80 years old, and things look even bleaker.

MANY of us still live in rural areas, and in rural areas fire is a problem, and we basically go dead when power is cut. EMS is also a problem for many older folks, and when you have MANY radio shadows, sparse cell coverage to stat with, and unreliable internet service -- it's more than a small step backwards. I have a neighbor with hearing loss and he simply cannot hear well enough to understand cell-phone conversations. He dropped his smart phone, and POOF - there goes 3 months of savings. -- I fear for Rural America more now that I have ever feared in my life. And it's only gonna get worse.

I still keep a landline for a number of reasons, and made sure that my parents (in their mid to late 80's) also have an active lanline. If nothing else, it's important in emergencies. I don't know what the technology entails in North America these days, but here in Israel, the phone company copper lines have their own independent power or voltage - in other words, if the entire electrical grid in a city goes down, the landline telephone still works!
Another consideration is that my internet service is carried by the telephone copper line, so I have the copper connected anyway, it only costs me an additional $7 a month to maintain the outgoing calls telephone service. If I wanted to only have incoming calls, I could have that for free...
The competing cable companies here, and a new fibre to the home service, are not yet reliable enough, nor are they avaialble everywhere, especially in older neighborhoods in the inner city.

I am bundled with Verizon Fios for TV, internet and VOIP phone. I am happy with this arrangement. I hate cell phones and my location is not in a good place for cell phone coverage regardless of the carrier. I am 78. I hope I am dead before I am forced to give up my “landline.”