Ditch the landline? What are the options?

musicprnt
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 14:15:35 +0000

@chuckdoodle:
That is interesting, in my area they converted everyone with land lines over to FIOS, you had no choice, they removed the physical copper wiring. From what I understand that is the game plan with most phone companies, they plan on getting rid of the copper network over the next 5-10 years or so.

There are issues with the VOIP implementaiton, 911 calls work differently and yes, if the power goes out you lose service unlike the old copper service. FIOS has a battery backup (which is freaking annoying, I have to reset it like once a month, starts beeping basically for no reason) that is supposed to work for 8 hours, and you can always have something like a generator as well. One person I know (not too bright) was happy to have a land line, but all their phones were wireless phones that require power to operate and when they lost power, found they couldn’t make a call (they didn’t have a plain jane phone around to plug in in that case). The only advantage network based phones might have are in the case of wires going down the fiber and cable network might be more resilient from I have heard (obviously, not if it is the connection to the house itself), but not certain of that either.