<p>I also don’t understand how people get by with just a cell phone when they have to carry it around to every room–maybe it’s mostly the younger set with small apartments that finds it practicable.</p>
<p>Other reasons to hang onto that landline–</p>
<p>The voice quality/clarity on cell phones doesn’t come close to that of landlines, especially if the call is cell phone to cell phone. The difference probably doesn’t mean much to a 20-year old, but as one gets older and hearing acuity starts to fade, it means more and more.</p>
<p>Power failures. My landline has never failed me, even when the power’s gone out for days. I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of being housebound during a storm with only a cellphone that I can’t re-charge. </p>
<p>The less than stellar reliability of the phones themselves–it seems everybody I know has had at least one experience of having to replace a lemon, and the more sophisticated the cell phone, the more likely it is to have problems.</p>
<p>I also use my landline to send faxes–I know I could work around this with a scanner and computer, but it’s just much easier to use a fax machine. And I remember how useless cell phones were in NYC on 9/11 because the volume of calls swamped the capabilities of the system, though perhaps the capacity has much improved since then.</p>