Slate says that growth of wireless phone customers in America combined with a bad economy has helped initiate an historic shift in how we think about landlines—specifically, they’re no longer considered an essential utility by a large portion of the population:
But in this first real slowdown of the wireless age, consumers seem to be saying that home-based telephones are expendable luxuries, like Starbucks lattes or Coach handbags. And it makes sense. Confronted with high inflation, soaring energy costs, and stagnant wages, millions of households are facing choices about which monthly bills to pay and which commitments to maintain. And if it comes down to one or the other, the mobile or the home-based land line, it’s clear which is a necessity and which is an option.
It’s not just tight budgets, though. Slate speculates that foreclosures are also having an effect, because as people move into rentals or in with relatives, they shut off existing landlines and don’t bother reconnecting.
I haven’t had a traditional landline since 2002. At first I moved to Vonage, then a DIY SIP setup that I never could get working correctly. Finally I realized it was both cheaper and simpler to just forego a home line entirely.
“Phones Without Homes” [Slate] (Thanks to SpiderJerusalem!)
(Photo: Getty)
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I agree, my LAN lines only purpose was to allow telemarketers to call me on a daily basis. Haven’t had one in probably 6 years now. Maybe 7, its been so long I don’t remember having one. I have lived off my cell phone for years, plus work pays for it. I never see the bill.
Been living without a land-line for nearly 3 years now – the ONLY time I have missed it is when having an alarm installed and having to pay extra for wireless monitoring because of no phone line – but thats only $5 a month… still much cheaper than the land-line. The only time I would want a land-line was if I had a home office/business, even then would probably be more cost-effective to just get an unlimited minutes plan.
I’ve never owned a landline phone. Never home, either. What do I need it for?
i wouldnt say luxury. is that 8 track player i got a luxury? i just consider it dead technology. far far from luxury.
@fostina1: Well, considering that the sound quality on my 40-year-old rotary phone is way better than that of any mobile I’ve ever used, it can indeed seem to verge on luxurious at times.
Of all my friends, only my fiancée has a landline, and that’s mainly because she owns her home and has an alarm system that requires it.
What’s the point? Unless your cell phone doesn’t work at your house, I can’t see any reason to have a landline.
I still have one (Vonage).
I like having a number that I can give to non-important people that I want to hear from but don’t want bugging me wherever I am at any time of day.
Sure, I could look at the screen and see who is calling me and decide not to take the call… but I am riddled with A.D.D. and that little distraction can cost me 15 minutes of re-focusing my concentration.
And, I know that companies sell telephone numbers to telemarketers. I’d rather see telemarketers get four rings at my unoccupied home than have a “number unavailable” call show up on my cellphone while I am trying to work.
All the non-important calls will result in a nice little group of messages at the end of my work day.
Another advantage is that people have the option of calling “me or my wife” or whoever is home in the evening rather than “only me” or “only my wife”. And I know that whenever I try to call someone (a business colleague or friend) I try them at home or the office first before wasting their cell minutes.
E-911 service can be a problem without a landline.
Plus there really are a few dead zones for mobile service.
What does a land line do that a cell phone doesnt? Nothing.
And my cell costs me less than the land line would!
Aw well… I still have my landline. Don’t know why, maybe it’s because I only pay $25 a month in telephone bills rather than the $50 charges of a cell phone.
Your satellite TV requires a landline to operate properly, especially when you order PPV channels.
Cordless phones are considered a luxury item. When the power goes out, so does your service. I keep a Old School trimline phone handy in those events.
The other thing is the landline service is a state- and federally guaranteed service, cell service is NOT. If a storm wipes out both services at once, which will take priority? The landlines of course. If both services break, which take precidence? The landlines again. Telecoms don’t want to get nailed for neglecting their copper lines for they can and will get nailed for it.
Landlines are a subsidized line item that the FCC and state pay for, so there are laws in place ordering the telecoms to maintain them.
I am considering going the other way — switching to a pay-as-you-go cellphone and mainly using a landline.
Between work and home, I would only be phone-free a couple of hours each day, usually when driving to work or meeting friends after work. I don’t answer my phone during that time anyway.
Don’t you need a landline for DSL? I’m considering it just to spite Comcast’s Internet, as it’s literally the ONLY alternative in my apartment.
We never use all of our cell minutes anyway. The landline served two purposes, so our kids could talk to their friends and so random telemarketers could bother us constantly on our unlisted number. Our telco sold the unlisted number and our names before we even had it hooked up. The first call was the local newspaper trying to sell us a subscription. I could find no benefit in wasting $30 a month to be annoyed.
If we need to give numbers to people we want to limit their access we use a Grand Central number. That way if they abuse it or sell it we can re-route the number.
I need a landline for my alarm system to work properly. I’m willing to pay for it considering it wasn’t all that long ago a meth addict threw a brick through my condo’s front window and crawled in after (5:30 am). We were home and the panic button was MUCH appreciated.
I haven’t had a true land line in about 6 years. I had one my freshman year of college because it was included as part of the room & board, but I never bothered to plug it in when I was a sophomore and moved off campus my junior and senior years (using only a cell phone).
For the last 2 years, in addition to my cell, i’ve had vonage. 2 reasons, i live in a building where someone can “call up” from the front door and i can hit 9 to let them in. Second is for people I don’t want to talk to like bill collectors and telemarketers, I have voicemail turned off on the vonage line as an added step for them to talk to me.
I could have the door go to any number I choose, but when I had a roommate (i live alone currently) I didn’t want people who were coming to see him ringing my cell phone to be let in. As far as having all other calls go to my cell, yes, as another poster pointed out, I have caller ID, but I don’t want those calls even coming to that phone in the first place. The only people who have that number are the people I want to have it.
@stanner: No it’s not. You can call 911 on any phone as long as it’s physically connected to the network, even if you don’t have service.
Plus if you have a cell phone, it SHOULD be able to locate you when you call 911. Though some companies *cough cough* Verizon *cough* don’t do that very well.
@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: No, you don’t need landline service for DSL. As long as the line is physically connected, you should be able to get DSL. Though they’ll charge you extra for it.
I am a single guy. I need a cellphone (mostly for work in case of an emergency) , I dont need a landline though. Yep, its a luxury.
I rarely use a phone at all. I ahve a four year old cellphone that costs me about 3 bucks a month (t-mobile to go prepaid). Every three months I buy 10 bucks worth of minutes.
Bonzombiekitty: please explain how to get unbundled DSL in Washington State,
because I’m in the same situation as Awesome-o. Where I live, the two
high-speed choices are Comcast and Verizon DSL, and Verizon has repeatedly
told me they don’t unbundle in Washington State.
@bonzombiekitty: Unfortunately most telcos disconnect land-lines that aren’t in use. No service, no dialtone. No dialtone, no calling 911.
I also much prefer the peace of mind coming from calling 911 from a land line and having my home address appear on the operators screen over calling 911 on my cell phone and them getting a ballpark location fix. They’d still need to know which unit in my condo complex I’m calling from, assuming that the GPS/whatever does pinpoint my location as being on the condo property.
@Angryrider:
I wish I could find a landline for 25 dollars. We finally got rid of ours in March when Verizon came out with unlimited minutes for 99 dollars. We realized that we were paying almost a hundred dollars a month for a landline phone no one was ever home to answer and to get multiple voice mail hang ups (telemarketers) Even being on the do not call list and having an unlisted number did not keep us from telemarketing calls.
Jeez, I must be a dinosaur. I need my landline because I don’t have a cellphone. My wife has one that we use when we are out, but otherwise I am at work(where I have a phone) or at home. If I’m out, well, I probably don’t want to be bothered anyway. People can leave a message at home if it is important and I’ll call them back. I don’t understand this NEED by everyone to be connected and available all the time. It’s mind boggling to me.
@bonzombiekitty: Yep, this is correct. Many phone companies now use a “soft disconnect” when people cancel service rather than physically cutting the wires (probably because it saves them a truck roll). If your wires are still connected to the network, you can still get 911 service even without having a landline phone number.
I have to agree that almost all the residential landlines my friends and family still have get inundated with telemarketing with comparison to cell phones. Maybe if the phone companies don’t want the usage numbers for landlines to slip so fast they should do something serious (ie, pressure Congress) to stop telemarketing instead of helping the marketers out. As for me, I’m landline free since 2004. And I’m happy to have saved that money.
@Nighthawke: Not true. We had an extended power outage a while back and my cell phone service still worked for over a day. It did, admittedly, go down eventually once the towers near us ran out of diesel fuel for their backup generators. But it’s simply false that your service will go down instantly when the power goes out. And yes, I know that landlines are a higher priority for the government. Personally, that just tells me that the government needs to rearrange their priorities to match changes in technology. It would seem to be much easier to me to get cell service up and running again after a disaster like a hurricane or earthquake than a bunch of landlines. With landlines, they have to repair all the individual lines that are damaged. With cells, they could just roll in temporary tower trucks if necessary.
@bonzombiekitty: Right. There was a case recently where one of the telcos (ATT, I think) was forced to offer DSL only plans without the commitment of a land line.
@Nighthawke: If anyone is in a storm that “takes out” both landline AND cell service, I would hope that they’re not at home trying to order pizza. If both go down, you’ve got greater concerns than trying to call someone. You’d probably have been evacuated to somewhere that had service, anyway.
@IphtashuFitz: It’s easy to test this out. If you can call the phone company’s customer service center by plugging a phone in the wall, you can call 911.
@IphtashuFitz: When you have your service shut-off, you can demand that they keep the connection for 911 service. It’s the law. Should you ever have to make that 911 call, it’ll register the address on the system.
I had my landline shut-off 5 years ago. And I’ll never have one again.
@Fuzz: You don’t have to pay attention to your cellphone just because you’re carrying it, you know. If you turn it off or turn it on silent when you don’t want to be bothered, it will take messages too. It’s just a convenience, and sometimes it’s really useful when you’re away from home on a trip.
@miramesa: That’s what I was thinking of doing, too. I got a land line because I got DSL when I moved into my apartment. My cell phone doesn’t get good reception in there so I can’t switch to just a cell phone.I barely talk on the phone and the people I do talk to are all local numbers so a cell wouldn’t really save me anything. I just like having a cell phone for emergencies.
I haven’t had a land-line in half a decade…I do live in DC and Im paranoid that if there is another big-emergency that I wont have a way to contact anyone..oh well.
I never lost cell service once during the big blackout in August 03. We’ve been land-line-free since about December of 02. As is oft stated above, it only served as a conduit for telemarketers. Our two cellphones collectively cost only $50 per month. I was paying close to that for just a single land-line.
Landlines are a ripoff, the cost of the calls we made were around $.15 while the all the surcharges and taxes were 25+. So just simply having the landline will cost us $25+ a month.
Both my wife and I work from home for part of our work time. We are currently using a SIP solution with E-911 and leveraging our cell phones. We kicked out the Telco last year and are no longer paying over $100 a month, dealing with outages, and dismissive customer (dis)service.
Our SIP solution has good voice quality and an excellent uptime record. We have cell phones as a backup. I got us both Grand Central accounts to “screen” or SIP numbers from clients so that they do not get direct dialed and can get a hold of us regardless of which of our phones we answer.
I do not foresee a scenario where we go back to $100 a month or more of outflow nor do I see SIP doing anything but improving as we move forward.
I still have a land-line only because it’s part of my FiOS package. It allows me to justify writing it off as a business expense since I only use it for work.
Landlines are so expensive compared to cell phones its no wonder. The next thing to go will be payphones…which, I predict, will be bad. Payphones are useful to call 911 or to prankcall people.
@loganmo: If there is another big emergency you may well have trouble contacting anyone with a landline, too. The long distance lines out of a city can only accommodate so many calls at once, and that number is a small fraction of all the people with phones in a big city. If everyone tries to call at once, you’re going to have trouble getting a line out. I’ve seen this happen with hurricane evacuations, and it happened all over on 9/11 as people called their relatives. So for a really big disaster, you may well be just as screwed with landlines as cell phones.
Gee the first thing off the grid in NY after 911 were cell phones. I didn’t have that trouble with my land line.
@xmarkd400x: “What does a land line do that a cell phone doesnt?”
Tell 911 where I live. We don’t have E-911 yet.
I’ve got a land-line because I have DSL. It costs me $9.50 for the privilege of having the line connected to my house because (as I’ve mentioned before) I live in what AT&T considers a “rural” area despite being in the center of a fucking city complete with urban property taxes and shitty schools. The phone service itself only costs me 50 cents for 30 monthly local calls, so I initially hooked it up for TiVo. I don’t mind 50 cents so people I don’t like have somewhere to call and leave messages on my machine.
I DO mind the 9-friggin-50, but I can’t do anything about THAT except switch to Comcast, to which I say HELL NO. I pay $29/mo for phone and DSL even with the ridiculous line fee. Cable’s cheapest internet-containing package locally is $45. It’s absurd.
@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: Not actually, they have a service called dry-loop, this is DSL without a phone line.
And it is NOT much more expensive, usually it is the same price. Remember that you get discounts though when you have phone service. So that makes the DSL + Phone portion look cheaper.
I don’t have a landline and no desire for one. I do expect I will get one when I have kids.
We still have a landline because we do business out of the house and also have a fax machine set up. We get unlimited long distance (I have siblings that live all over the place) so for us it is worth the $45 a month.
@TheShepherd: Agreed. I haven’t had a land line since 2002. And even then, I had an unlisted number. My number only goes to those people that need it. And they WILL NOT give it out. My ex-wife’s attorney found this out to his immense displeasure when our son had an Order Of Protection (restraining order in Arkansas) placed against his mother. He had his law license suspended for a short time.
Anyway, traditional phone companies are going the way of the 8-track. Especially since the introduction of Vonage, etc.
Although I understand the reasoning, usually in the cases of emergency, one of the first things to get overwhelmed or knocked out completely are cell phone lines. I keep my landline for just in case. It doesn’t cost that much.
What kind of landlines are people using that are so expensive?!… A hundred bucks a month?!
We have a landline for a couple of reasons– for starters, we need to have it for our building’s buzzer/intercom system, since our cell phones are both considered long distance. Plus, we wouldn’t want the buzzer to ring to one of our cells and not the other– having it ring the house makes a lot more sense.
We also have it for the peace of mind that it provides. Should the power go out, we’ve got a phone. What if the power goes out for a long period of time? Can’t charge up the old cell phone without power. And if the cell phone is almost dead when the power goes out? Screwed. And, like other people have noted, landlines are far more stable and reliable in the case of an emergency.
We don’t give out the number to anyone and we RARELY get telemarketing calls. We’ve got our number blocked and unpublished and on the no-call list– that does a pretty good job of making sure we don’t get unwanted calls. We also don’t give out the number to family or friends, just to make sure the number doesn’t get out there. It’s a strictly buzzer and emergency only line.
If I’m home during the day, I’ll occasionally make local calls from the house phone rather than my cell phone because it’s free and won’t use up my cell minutes. Other than that, we use our cell phones for everything.
How much does this “luxury” cost us a month? $12.00. It’s basic, yes– no caller ID, no call waiting, no voicemail. It’s just a local phone. It can call long distance, for an additional $.10 per minute. But that’s it.
To us, the peace of mind and convenience of having the landline is totally worth the $12.00 a month…
@linus: That is already happening. Southwestern Bell got rid of all of their payphones in Arkansas in 2007.
@Fuzz: Agreed. I pissed off my last boss by giving him my cell number (for emergencies) and then turning it off during my work hours and not answering him after hours. When he barged in asking where was a good number to reach me I pointed at the wall phone and gave him that one. After that, he had no reason to be talking to me unless my laboratory was on fire. Afterall, he did not pay for my personal phone, so it’s not a work phone for him to be wasting my minutes, which are few.
Where the heck are people getting service for a landline that it costs more than a cellphone??? Wow. Mine is bundled so I forget how much it is, but it’s either $15 or $20/mo. I have the cheapest plan on my phone and I still pay twice that for the cell.
Thanks Consumerist! you reminded me to cancel our landline service. The $25 per month phone service we have turns out to be $46 per month after taxes and surcharges.
I pay $41 per month for mobile phone service with text messages and internet access.
I haven’t had a landline for years. I used to live in a building that had a door buzzer that would dial your landline only, and that was the only thing I used it for. $30 a month doorbell. So I ditched it when I moved.
Someone commented that satellite TV etc requires a land line for PPV. That’s not true anymore. My receiver has a LAN port on it so I can simply hook it up to the internet and it calls home that way.
I think anyone under the age of 30 isn’t gonna have a landline at this point. I know even when I buy a house I probably won’t get a traditional landline, but maybe a SIP service routed through an asterisk box, or just forgo that entirely and get a docking station for a cellphone and just use that as a landline. If I’m gonna be paying nearly $50 for my cell (or $100 for 3 cells) I don’t think I want to pay another $15-20 for another line that I’ll rarely use.
I contributed!
Seriously, though, if DSL had been available unbundled in 2000, I never would have had a landline after my freshman year. The fact I had to come home and deal with 16.6 dial-up was hurtful to my soul. My husband wants us to have a landline for emergencies, but our town doesn’t have a ton of crime, and I have the Sherriff’s station on speed dial, just in case (we live behind a pub).
Cable HSI and Magicjack
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