What's really killing the land-line phone business.
Comment: When ATT was the only source they killed their own business with so many Plans, extra fees, pages of them and their ongoing escalating pricing policies. The starw that broke my back was when I was billed a large fee to cancel my service.
Comment: Perhaps the land lines would do slightly better if it didn't take SEVERAL WEEKS to get set up? The last time i moved, I was without a landline for over 6 weeks while Verizon supposedly processed my request and set up my access. I can walk into a mobile phone store and have a working phone number in minutes.
Comment: There are still rural areas, particularly in the mountainous West where the terrain doesn't allow for cell coverage and being rural, the telcos do not have a large enough populace to fork out the costs to run broadband. I have a home in a very mountainous and very rural area in Northern California and though there is cell coverage in the area, the mountains and ridges prevent my cell phone from getting reception at the house so thus no choice but to keep the landline and also the local carrier has no financial incentive to run DSL to the the half dozen homes that cover a distance of about 5 miles in a deep valley road.
Comment: Sad to say, landlines are definitely on the way out... About 5 years ago I got rid of my Bell Telephone service and went with Vonage VOIP. For just a little over $30/month (including ALL taxes, fees, etc) I can talk for an UNLIMITED amount of time to anywhere in the US, Canada or Puerto Rico - not sure if Mexico is included in that or not. Other international calls can be made for low, reasonable fees, although I do not use that part of the service. Also, all the features I had with my land-line are included with my VOIP - caller ID, call waiting, voice mailbox, three-way calling, and so on.
I have a cell phone to use primarily when I am out of the house and "need" to make a call, but, like the land-line service, figuring out the monthly bill in advance can give one a headache. Fees for added features (like caller id, call waiting, etc), roaming charges, and long distance charges to anywhere not in the covered area make some cell carriers a fearful lot indeed.
Some land-line companies (I am thinking of a few I know of in Canada) offer unlimited long distance calling for a set fee (around $20/month). There is no good reason that ANY land-line company should be charging on a per minute basis for such service. If you stop and think, the money they would save in their billing department alone would almost offset any profits they would "lose" from dropping the per minute charges for LD.
Basically, I would probably prefer to HAVE an "old fashioned" land-line phone if the costs were more reasonable, but as for now VOIP is serving me VERY well. The service is great, as is the voice quality. And I NEVER have any surprises at the end of the month when my bill comes in!
Comment: Sad to say, landlines are definitely on the way out... About 5 years ago I got rid of my Bell Telephone service and went with Vonage VOIP. For just a little over $30/month (including ALL taxes, fees, etc) I can talk for an UNLIMITED amount of time to anywhere in the US, Canada or Puerto Rico - not sure if Mexico is included in that or not. Other international calls can be made for low, reasonable fees, although I do not use that part of the service. Also, all the features I had with my land-line are included with my VOIP - caller ID, call waiting, voice mailbox, three-way calling, and so on.
I have a cell phone to use primarily when I am out of the house and "need" to make a call, but, like the land-line service, figuring out the monthly bill in advance can give one a headache. Fees for added features (like caller id, call waiting, etc), roaming charges, and long distance charges to anywhere not in the covered area make some cell carriers a fearful lot indeed.
Some land-line companies (I am thinking of a few I know of in Canada) offer unlimited long distance calling for a set fee (around $20/month). There is no good reason that ANY land-line company should be charging on a per minute basis for such service. If you stop and think, the money they would save in their billing department alone would almost offset any profits they would "lose" from dropping the per minute charges for LD.
Basically, I would probably prefer to HAVE an "old fashioned" land-line phone if the costs were more reasonable, but as for now VOIP is serving me VERY well. The service is great, as is the voice quality. And I NEVER have any surprises at the end of the month when my bill comes in!
Comment: I've been tossing around the idea of getting rid of my landline. I have Vonage digital landline phone service and it's quite cheap for general service fees. However, where it really saves me money is in international calls. I have a good cell phone plan, but if I make a call overseas I'm pusihng back my retirement a few more years!! With my landline, I pay only a few cents a minute for international. For now I"m keeing my landline until cell companies get more competitive with international pricing. So, moral of the story is, getting rid of a landline makes sense for many, but not for all. And, the contracts that cell companies lock you into is more corrupt than the landline companies. New court case in California will hopefully change that for other states.
Comment: OK, but just wait until you get your brain tumor or other serious problem from putting a radiating cell phone next to your head for hours each month. About ten to twenty years of constant use should do it. (much quicker than cigarettes harm you) according to the latest research. Ah well, what's life after forty anyway???
Comment: Well, ah, I use telephones to talk to people. Not to take pictures, play games, listen to music, surf the net, or other activities that will just run down the battery to the point that I can't use it in case of emergency (to my mind, the only real use I would have for a cell phone). I have VoIP at home; it costs, with taxes & fees, $20.04, and gives me 500 minutes a month. That's eight hours and twenty minutes a month. I seldom go over, let's see, 64 minutes on my plan, leaving 436 minutes. I also used 15 free minutes, which would be incoming calls. I really try to get people I know (those who call long distance) to let me call them back, since I have such a surplus most every month.
Comment: I wished I'd ditched my land-line years earlier than I did. And once I did, I've never looked back! I ABSOLUTELY HATE with a passion the big, monopolystic phone companies who think they are the only game in town and thus, don't have to answer to their customers. I was sick and tired of inflated bills, of being nickeled and dimed to death, of CONSTANTLY incorrect bills that you'd have to deal with rude, snarky and incompetent customer service reps (a misnomer if ever there was one!), often spending HOURS on the phone with them, to get fixed. With my VOIP phone, I pay a set fee that I can consistently budget for without surprise each month; I get free features standard that I would have been nickeled and dimed to death for with a landline phone company... it's just SOOOOO much better.
Comment: What is killing the landline is the telemarketers, the survey takers and every idiot that thinks that there purpose or point of view deserves to be pushed into everyone else's face. "I want to say what I want to say and it doesn't matter if you want to hear it or not. Sort of the kind of mindset where people stick in comments about Obama and the media when the topic is telephone landlines. No wonder they have no problem finding people to make the calls, there are so may of these people out there.
Comment: Why does Obama get an unfair amount of coverage? Does no one in the news have any ethics anymore? The coverage should be fair so people can make up their own minds, not be lead like blind sheep.
Comment: Why does Obama get an unfair amount of coverage?
Comment: What is a landline telephone?
Comment: Land lines have become a huge fraud. There is only one phone company we can use in our apartment complex - like many comments before, the $29.95 a month service ends up being nearly $50 a month without long distance. The only calls we ever got were never-ending telemarketers, so we had the line disconnected (and it took them months to get us our credit balance and deposit to us - we had to threaten small claims court!). Now - we STILL get telemarketers calling! I asked what number they were calling, and finally one was able to tell me. I dialed that number and got a "circuit busy" recording. So we've unplugged all the phones... What a scam...
Comment: My landline was $40. a month for just basic service. The cable landline is $25. and includes all the bells and whistles. I don't see the phone company lowering it's rates to attract more customers. For years they were arrogant and tresated their customers like trash. I hope they go under. I don't like having long conversations on my cell though, because it gets hot. I am hoping they will combine the 2 phones so that they use the same number and I can use the home unit when at home and the cell unit when away.
Comment: The loss of customers hasn't pushed the phone company into lowering it's prices. I was paying $40. a month for a basic phone. the cable based phone is only $25. a month and comes with all the bells and whistles. I hope my old phone company goes under. They deserve it for cheating us for all these years.
Comment: The real reason land lines are disappearing is because its stupid to pay $37 per month for basic land line service plus taxes, and then have to pay more (to a different company!) per minute every time you make a call unless its a "LOCAL" call or get a long distance package--when you can get a cell phone and for a flat $40 per month call anywhere in the US for as long as you want (as long as you follow the "minutes" rules. It the wired carriers want to stay in business they have to compete. If they would support photo/ texting/email enabled cordless phones plus high speed internet service and call anywhere, anytime service all for a flat rate of around $30 per month (cheaper than cell phones, since they ARE far less mobile), they'd probably still be growing.
Comment: I need a wireless phone to keep in touch, and to conduct what little business I still do, though I???m retired.
I don???t need a land line at over $40 a month, just to get telemarketers to hassle me, and Quest won???t even talk about a reduced rate for seniors or low usage.
Also, why would you want to deal with a company who only hires jerks or people who neither speak nor understand the language that we all use to communicate in this country.
Comment: The economy? Are you serious? Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill while ignoring the elephant in the room - YOUNG PEOPLE DON'T CARE ABOUT LANDLINES. I'm 28-years old and know even I'm not on the front end of this trend with many people older than myself passing on the option of a landline. In this age of cell phones with full bars, why dish out an extra $30 a month for a never-used service?
It's not economy-related, it's called the changing times. The horse and buggy didn't disappear because of a bad economy, it disappeared because we found something better.
Comment: wireless is a godsend. I spent two months without any power in South Florida after hurricane Wilma, and we made due with our cel phones and absolutely no working land lines. There were no traffic signals, power for our computers, the joy of sitting in 2-3 hour lines for gas, groceries, and walgreens, and double that amount for traffic to keep on moving with our lives. Having our cel phones allowed us to continue during a terrible time, go to work, pay our bills. My office was destroyed, but I was able to keep in touch with my employers during a state of emergency which lasted for two months. not everything is about your quasi intellectual policy -green-wasteful bla bla bla bull crap. you would not have had the internet connection to post this message much less a land line to use in this situation.
you also spelled hypocrite wrong you computer using hypocrite. go hug a tree and clean a land fill you quasi tree hugger.
Comment: And you spelled cell phone wrong...it's CELL...not CEL
Comment: hehehe touche
Comment: Wow, specific situations in which something you agree with has been useful to someone
somewhere. Truth is cell phones are a technology that has been proven to cause brain cancer
and is still sold by the billions without proper wave protection, the whole basis of the
wireless communication is based off of idiotic policy designed to seperate idiots from their
money because they must talk all the time no matter what, and most definately is a waste of
resources for all the so called "green" politicals being that cell phones are replaced on a
flight of fancy every month or so with landfills being littered with them. You have idiots
trying to get you to destroy your old non japanised computer hardware because they consider
it a waste of space when there are multiple offenders of worse wastes every time the
hypocrits take a trashbag out to be thrown away and probably have 5-10 dead cell phones
lying around their homes constantly being bought and replaced due to the non regulated policies of company after company and the attitude they have worked so hard to instill in people...
Comment: And yet A.T.&T treats me (a land-line customer) like dirt! I am on permanent disability and have trouble making ends meet. I got behind a month on making payments and every month for 2 or 3 days they shut off my long distance. When I get my disability check I make a payment and long distance comes back on. I made arrangements to pay the overdue balance and when my phone bill came I (with Advanced Degrees) couldn't understand it. So I called for an explanation. This happened every month for three months. Each time I called, I got a different story. Finally, in the end, they told me I had defaulted on my agreement with them and I was right back where I started. The problem is I am one of the few people who really can't justify a cell phone. But I can't begin to tell you how much I hate A.T.&T. (Where the customer comes last)!
Comment: I agree. AT&T sucks!! I've never gotten good customer service from them...AND it takes FOREVER to get a real person on the line.I've never felt like they really care about their customers. They've become suck a mega-giant in the phone industry, maybe they feel like they don't have to. I only have a land line because I had to in order to get my internet service...they wouldn't let me opt out of it....so I pay the extra $40 a month for a phone I don't use...well...maybe once in a while when my cell phone battery is dead.
Comment: You need to call AT&T and play hardnose to get their "naked DSL". It's where you get DSL without having to have a landline as well.
Comment: I completely agree. AT&T sucks. I've never gotten good customer service from them and it's takes FOREVER to get a real person on the line in the first place.
Comment: Piracy is alive and well at your local land-line phone company. My $30/month line costs $50/mo, including fees, taxes, long distance non-usage penalties, ad nauseum. We are charged a $5/month penalty for failure to use long distance (our family is all in Dallas). Furthermore, two years ago, one excise tax was dropped by the government, but immediately replaced by a telephone company "Cost recovery fee" for the same amount. Most people never noticed the tax savings because of the new fee! Who thought you need a ship and body of water to be a pirate? I'm not happy about it, but our community has no alternative. Thanks for listening.
Comment: You need to just get the most basic service with NO long-distance. The cost, usually, for most basic is approximately 11 bucks. After taxes, it adds up to around less than 20 bucks total. For long distance sign up with one of the non-Bell LD carriers such as one called Pioneer. They don't charge you anything except for the long distance calls you make and their rate is about 3 cents a minute for nationwide calls. Put our mom on this plan and her phone bill from the Bell is less than 20 bucks and she only uses about a coupla bucks of long distance a month. At those rates she doesn't have any incentive to use her cellphone.
Comment: another reason why I don't bother with land lines. so much money and for what!!!???
Comment: Because of the monstrous taxes, fees, & excise taxes etc. I've decided to go with VOIP over my internet connection, and have moved my 25 year old land line phone number to a cell carrier in spite of not liking their multi-year contract bs.
Comment: "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. One lets you make telephone calls only from your house. The other lets you make telephone calls from anywhere, send e-mails, surf the Internet, play music, and take photographs."
This is really a misleading statement. For both wireless and land line, the services you have depend on the package you choose. Except for photographs, the land line can do everything that's named if you choose to have those services. Nothing is for free for either wireless or land lines. Normally, land lines are more secure and more reliable than wireless. Internet is also available at much greater speeds on a land line.
Comment: I just wonder what all these people who have decided to depend on their cell phones and internet phones will do if there is some kind of disaster that takes down a large part of the power grid. When that happens there will be no internet or cellular phone service. Landlines do not depend on the power grid for their service so they will still work. This is one of the major reasons I will not let my wife drop our landlines, that plus cell service is not consistant, even in a major metropolitan area such as we live in.
Comment: If a large disaster takes down the "grid", I'll loot and pillage like everyone else.
Comment: If a disaster takes down a large part of the power grid, I'll just loot and pillage like everyone else.
Comment: Correct, land lines can work off their backup generators at the switch or a remote carrier site if the power grid goes out, but most cell towers have generators too. So, they tie on that point. Drop your land line and, if your power is out for an extended period, charge your cell phone using your car. You'll save some money, assuming you don't need DSL or one of the telco offered video services. The residential market for data and video will be split between the cable companies and the telcos, with the cable companies having a head start on the video side. It will be interesting to see if the telcos can afford to place facilities in new areas if they can only get 20%-30% of the homeowners as customers.
Comment: Actually you were correct when phones were electrical, but phones now are switched by computers and use electronic switches. Those computers require the grid. Power outages will affect your land lines too. If they have backup systems, they will be ok for a while provided, trunk lines don't fill up and cells have backup power. Last power outage that I went through, which lasted 11 hours. My cell phone was still fine
Comment: In Kobe, Japan when they had their earthquake about 13 years ago, All land line service was lost in the area and land lines connecting outside the area. There were a few people with cell phones at aht time, but they were the only ones getting through. I guy went on a trip and returned home to find the house had collapsed. Had no idea where his family was. He used his cell and found them alive.
Comment: In Kobe, Japan when their earthquake struck, land line service was out. Most people with cell phones were still able to contact their loved ones. One person was on a trip and found his family at a different house since theirs collapsed but everyone survived. He was later able to meet up with his family. Most cells, at least in Japan, have backup power, land lines are not guaranteed. It seems lik eyou nee both.
Most
Comment: Just how exactly is someone supposed to use DSL internet if there is no copper pair running to their home? The landline won't be dead yet as long as DSL remains a viable internet option. On the flip side however I wouldn't mind seeing all the telephone poles come down. If we could only convince the electrical company then to bury their cables...
Comment: Land Lines carriers have been ripping us off for decades, I am glad that now a whole new generation is "taking them to the cleaners" sort of speak ....
Comment: Wife and i are in our fifties; just moved. For the first time we do not have a land line. Why? When figuring costs the land line was almost competitive until we added the incredible fees and taxes. So, we use voip and prepaid cellphones to save a lot of money every month!
Comment: I got rid of my landline in Mar 2007. The basic service fee (about $40) was just too much for the amount of time I actually used the phone and it did not even offer the benefit of dsl. The phone companies have put zero effort into landlines, the current lines have been paid for for decades. I like the convenience of the cell phone, but again, I think even the minimal plan I have is still too expensive.
Comment: Other reasons for the decline of the landline are the excessive fees and taxes piled on by Federal, State, and Local governments on top of bogus fees added by the carriers. A basic phone line has more than doubled in price in the past ten years due to added fees and taxes.
Comment: Truly RURAL America is where the land lines are being used! If I try to make a cell call from my home, the signal is weak and the call is inevitably dropped! We have NO choice. The lack of towers in Rural America is what keeps TracFone's in business! If you must have both, your cell is a cheap one...
Comment: The only comment I have is that the TRULY rural areas of the US have not caught up to the rest of the world. If I try to make a cell call from my home, there is weak signal and the call is inevitably dropped! That's where the land lines are now: in the rural areas with no towers! We have NO choice...
Comment: I am 26 and I use my landline phone every day. In fact, I use it more than I use my cell phone.
Comment: I am 26 and I use my landline phone every day. In fact, I use it more than I use my cell phone.
Comment: I would like to drop my land-line but can't as my husband has a hearing problem and I can't find a cell to help with that. I other good thing about dropping the line is that telemarketers don't call my cell.
Comment: I am a proud parent of a six year old, and 2 four year old girls. I must say that maintaining our land line, though costly, is important for kids to have access to when learning how to use a phone. They enthusiastically answer the phone when the grandparents call. I would hate to think of an emergency and the kids not being able to locate the cell phone to call for help. This is one advantage of having a wired phone, not to mention teaching them to use the old fashioned white pages for listings. We live in a rural area and we're charged $35 monthly with no long distance.
Comment: I agrree that any familys with children need a stationary phone in the house so the children can call 911. This does not have to be the traditional landline, it can be a VOIP line, but it must be able to call 911 and get your local center and be in one consistant place so children know where to go to use it.
Other than that, I have been landline free for five years now. I use my cell phone 99% of the time and my Skype about 1% of the time for video conferencing with my elderly parents who live in a rural area.
Comment: Land Lines - having to go register at the Do Not Call Registry to cut down on the advertising phone calls and then being bombarded by Qwest advertisements to 'enhance' your service. Apparently they get to keep on calling since you do business with them. Total crap. I pay money so I can have my phone used by advertisers to harass and annoy me? Why would anyone want to keep that sort of thing around the house any longer?
Comment: I have version land line, but I use my cell phone for all long distance. I guess version figured this out and now charge a flat fee of $30 a month for long distance calls weather you use the service or not. That is enough to tick me off enough to consider dropping the land line!
Comment: People do not realize that cell phones and wireless phones are regularly spied on by other people and also the government and who knows who else using scanners. Everyone talks of invasion of privacy etc. but do not take the trouble to see what they are giving up. In the drive to deregulate, the Carter administration opened up the added costs of access fees, increased taxes etc. which has driven up the cost of land lines so much that even I finally gave up and gave up my land line.wemt only to
Comment: I get where the trendy author is going with this, but how does one write an article comparing land lines and cell phones without even mentioning the main reason why people stay with land lines: quality of service? Given the choice of the two, who makes a call from their home on their cell phone? My land line doesn???t drop calls at random 2-3 times day. My land line always has crystal-clear reception. My land line has 100% real-time conversations without any weird ???talk-over??? delays. Compared to land lines, both cell phones and Internet phone service are immature technologies, and each have many years to go to reach the quality of land-line calls. I???ll hold on to the land-line as long as I can afford it.
Comment: > Given the choice of the two, who makes a call from their home on their cell phone?
Me, constantly. I dropped my landline a while back, but for years I constantly made calls from my cell instead when I had both. I haven't had a phone call dropped on my cells in months if not longer - I can't even remember the last time - and I find the voice quality to be better. I understand that's not the case in all places in the country or even on all blocks in any given city/town, but there are many many places where it is true.
As far as the person mentioning privacy, cell phone transmissions are encrypted on any modern technology, and very hard to intercept. I won't claim impossible, but hard. Meanwhile, using a cordless phone, the signal can be picked up easily by anyone within several hundred feet without an protection at all. Unless you're paranoid enough to sit in one placed on a corded phone (and its not like it'd be that hard for a motivated spyer to tap into that either), cell phones about as protected as it gets.
Comment: Basic phone rate in Texas is $ 9,.00, $ 12.00 added to it are taxes - and that is the reason
I will give up my landline.
Comment: Until the cost of overseas calls on cell phones goes down I won't be cutting my land line.
Comment: yeah, i said the same thing in my post as well...I have a good cell plan, but boy do they rake me over the coals for an international call!!! about $20 for ah hour!!! OUCH! A few cents a minute for landline international calls.
Comment: Until the cost of overseas calls on cell phones goes down I won't be cutting my landline.
Comment: I haven't had a land line for about 5 years now (currently 30) b/c it was a total waste of money between the standard fee they charge for the line itself on top of the various taxes that are applied to said 'fee'. It's not even worth it to get a phone line with one of the cable packages b/c you're still paying more than you would be without it after their promotional time frames run out.
Comment: We had both. Nearing our 70's the landline was a holder -- until the service was lost for a week and we never noticed it. And that was over five years ago! We never had the line fixed, just removed the service and continued with the better service (at better pricing) that our cell phones offerred. Double the convenience at a lesser cost. Sorry it has taken others so long to learn the same lesson.
Comment: And for our next article; What killed the pony express.
Comment: yeah, I get your point, but for some of us, the mail service would be cheaper with ponies.
(psssssst) International rates my friend, that's where cell service still doesn't compete in terms of pricing, not even close. So, it's not a slame dunk necessarily.
Comment: I can't believe you didn't mention all the fees that are slapped onto a land line. I would vastly prefer to keep my telephone at home. I had a basic land line, no long distance, no call waiting, no frills. The FCC and government fees and taxes doubled the cost over the years. I finally gave up two years ago and got a cheap throwaway phone. No more fees save for sales tax. I'd rather have my land line back, though.
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