Telcos Pulling the Plug on Landlines?

back in 1956, nearly 70 years ago, we switched from hand-cranked magneto phones. a lot has changed, and I am sitting here with a headset which is sans a cord, which I love when I am on hold for 30 minutes. I cannot figure how to marry this set to my tracfone and am a bit frustrated. BTW the tracfone costs $7/month!

In 2008 my Verizon landline costs were becoming unreasonable (to me) so we dropped Verizon and went to Majic Jack which was being hyped at the time. Magic Jack worked well but I didn't care for their oversea customer service and the fact it was a foreign company.
I then replaced MJ with OOMA in 2009 but after 10 years found out that the consol will die without any warning. I replaced the dead consol with a new one that took almost 10 days to arrive. OOMA operates just fine but has the habit of resetting itself every so often which can take 10 minutes.
Now, as of this date (Dec 2024) I'm switching to Comcast VOIP.
There is a lot more to say about why all the switching but it's mostly just personal preference. MJ and OOMA worked just fine as far as making/receiving phone calls.

MERRY CHRISTMAS Bob and everyone here.

I bought a OBI box on Amazon four years ago that runs my free Google Voice number through my 12 house phones. Works fantastic, but the Obi boxes are no longer available (new). When mine dies I'll put the google voice number on a spare cell phone and hook that up via Bluetooth to a house phone that has Bluetooth.

My husband and I (both baby boomers, so definitely not young lol) have only cell phones in our home, and it’s been that way for over a decade. We live in an area where the cellular service as well as the electrical grid are quite reliable. We can always charge phones from battery options as needed if it ever came to that (which it hasn’t thus far.)

The big issue is for people who don’t live in such areas. Being able to adequately service those living in rural areas, for example, where reliability can be an issue is hugely important in the quest to retire all POTS service.

I don’t know what I would do without my landline. It’s necessary for me because I live in a remote area and the cell service may only has a couple bars most of the time. There are days you can’t place a call with cell. Sometimes the cell phone will stop allowing people from hearing me talk and vice versa. Whenever the landline stops working because maybe the squirrels chewed the wires, I just call Verizon and they fix whatever the problem is quickly. I usually just ask people to call on the landline because it’s very reliable.

As many people here in the SE U.S. discovered after the recent hurricane you can wind up with no one to rely on including the U.S. Government! It's best to have as many alternatives as possible: Public water, well and rain catchment systems, Public sewer, septic and incinerator toilet systems Public electric, wind, solar and water wheel systems and land line, cellular and VOIP (cable) phone systems have been known to suffer outages, sometimes for long periods. In my area I find I need backups to the backups regularly so sunshine, please don't take my landline away.

In about 2019, I decided to switch my Internet and phone services from copper line to fiber and VoIP when I switched my Internet service from ATT's Internet-50 service (using my copper line) to fiber 300 (abandoning my copper line altogether). I purchased a MagicJack device, connecting it to the base-station for my wireless home phone system. A year or so after switching to Fiber-300 service, ATT 'upgraded' me to Fiber-500 'at no additional cost'. That may have changed as they updated their fee structures over the years since then. Today, I pay about $70.00/month for Fiber-500 Internet service, and $39.00/month (or less when MJ offers a discount for purchasing a multi-year plan). Both my Internet and VoIP phone services work very well (my MagicJack service sound quality is indistinguishable from what I had with my old copper wire-connected phone service), so I'm very happy with what I have, and the only reason I would consider making any changes would be if MJ or ATT decide to significantly increase their fees at some point in the future.

Ernie (Oldster)

The big problem I see are regarding fire and security panels. A lot of local authorities require one or both lines to the panels for reporting alarms or troubles be a copper line. I can't argue with that.

In metropolitan South Florida the power went out for 5 or 6 hours. NO PHONE, not even my Comcast "landline".WE had no idea what was happening. With
world affairs as they are, could even have been a missle attack. What about the next major Solar Outburst that will affect ALL communications, maybe even REAL landlines

hate the fact we'll have no landlines anymore! we have cells but have house phone - it is wireless and I hate it! when electric goes out, we always had our landline if no lines were cut, now everything goea...disgusting! plus we pay out the nose for these services and on a fixed income, it aint easy. we only use our cells for emergencies away from home, dont even like the cells either. why cant they leave well enough alone? if landlines were copper, seems to me there wouldnt be a lot of maintenane and they wouldnt need replacement for ages.....

We have only two choices at our residence; the local cable provider with iffy service or the phone company. After dealing with the terrible cable service we switched to the almost-as-terrible phone company. We are moving at a blinding 20Mbps on DSL for internet access, BUT we are still able to get dial tone when we lose power. Unfortunately, we also live in a cell phone black hole, much to the chagrin of visitors. We don't anticipate upgrades anytime soon. Ah, technology!

A landline number cannot be ported to a Google Voice number.

We still have CenturyLink land line service at two home locations and get great service at both locations. No talk of them doing away with landline service any time soon.

Eleven years ago when I moved to a new residence, i decided to go with Vonage with their VOIP service.I have been satisfied with their set-up where the voice service goes over internet.

I have service with a wireless ISP and it has been pretty good with some outages,mostly due to power failures.With the Vonage box provided,I am able to use the standard telephones I was used to when I had the basic landline services.

I have the extras such as voicemail,call waiting,etc that costed an additional fee when I had landline service.

I work in the Electronic Security Industry and in my work I provide support to technicians and customers alike. As a veteran of the Telecommunications industry, I read the FCC ruling: I understand and basically agree with their reasoning but totally disagree with their ruling of procedures. Most (telephone-based) modems either do not work with VOIP or have serious hand-shaking issues using VOIP with no guarantee of connectivity between the modem and the central office. That is a critical issue for security devices. There is a dishonesty in saying, "if it works with voice then it will work with machines." Telecommunications providers need to be explicit that there may be unresolvable issues for machine (modem) communications before and during the transition from POTS to VOIP. Still, users of equipment incorporating telephone-based modems should start looking at upgrading the equipment to use either cell or Internet connectivity.

Our situation is a bit different. We live in a remote location with neither landline, cell, nor electrical service. We generate our own electricity via 3 different methods as needed and use Viasat satellite service.

I think I will have to look into some of the options that you write about. Thanks for the information!

All those phone alternatives need an internet connection. A cousin living in LA on very low income is without any connection. People like him used to get a landline with a low amount of calls allowed. Back in the Obama administration that was changed to inexpensive smart phones. The trouble is that those are very limited and break nowadays within 2-3 weeks.That cousin relies on the US mail to communicate. If his apartment building was wired for internet, one of the phone options you list might be useful to him. But his building has no internet. He can walk to a library, that is his only choice of late.

When I switched cable companies to ATT, without notifying me, they also switched me to VOIP. I only found out about it when we had a very rare power outage and I tried calling out on the landline and the line was dead. Very p/o when I realized the switch w/o being notified.

I live in Toronto, Canada. I have a Bell landline and a DSL internet connection with a small ISP. The landline has gotten very expensive but I'm keeping it because it has good sound quality and I have hearing problems.

I expect that Bell will want to switch from copper sooner or later but I hope it's after I pass on which may not be very long.

I do not have a cellphone. It seemed like a waste of money because I'm rarely out alone and my daughter has one.

For my fellow Canadians, my ISP is Tamco Technologies of Canada (i.e., Tamcotec). It's a one man operation but part of a larger group. We've been with Tamco for more than 20 years and receive excellent service. So, if you are looking for an ISP in southern Ontario, I can recommend it.