<p>Has anyone done this? We are considering dropping it and moving the number (which I have had for over 30 years) to a cell phone, so we don’t lose it or the few calls we get on it. What are your thoughts? The major upside is that it would save $, of course. I can’t think of any down sides, except in case of a blackout, which doesn’t happen often. Are there any real down sides?</p>
<p>We switched about 6 months ago. No issues at all. Just have to keep it charged, and remember to put it on nightstand at night,(for those calls you never want to receive as a parent) and take it with you when watching a loud movie downstairs in the man cave.</p>
<p>I would make the switch except our security system is connected through the land line. I wonder if there is a way around this.</p>
<p>This is something that I think about every year.</p>
<p>We have DSL so internet service is dependent on the landline. We have the absolute cheapest landline service and it costs about $16/month. Getting dryloop DSL would mean that the landline for DSL would cost $10/month. The service basically gives us very little - some local calls and that’s it. We use Google Voice to make most non-local calls (free calls in the United States and very cheap outside the US).</p>
<p>We also have prepaid cell-phones which cost $100/year per person.</p>
<p>We live in an area with a lot of snow and ice so we do sometimes lose power which would be a problem with a pure VOIP solution.</p>
<p>So for now, the cost of the landline is low enough (effectively $6 over dryloop) that we’re keeping it. Our total Internet/Landline bill is $44/month. Cabel internet can’t touch that in our area.</p>
<p>We went to cable phone/internet/tv package. That made the phone no cost. The advantage is that you can make long distance calls on the phone with no bill and no minutes on your cel phone. We use our cels so much for work (self employed) that we are glad to save our cel minutes by using the landline when we can.
Of course, we have no idea how to check the messages on the landline and barely told people when the number changed. It is used for outgoing calls only. We have one corded landline in the kitchen so you can’t even hear it ring half the time and when it does its a telemarketer.
Is cable an option for you?</p>
<p>We do have the phone/cable/internet combo, and each one costs around $30/ month. I don’t know if dropping the phone would actually drop one of these $30, leaving $60 a month. That’s a good question. Got some pondering to do… thanks!</p>
<p>In December, we dropped ours. All four of us have cell phones, and my husband’s number is now the old house number. Definitely good to keep the house number attached to a phone. If we hadn’t, D would have missed the call for a Yale interview!</p>
<p>Living in California, I keep the land line in case of earthquakes or other emergencies. When there’s an earthquake the cell towers become overloaded and no one can get through. In the two serious earthquakes we’ve experienced, the land lines have always worked.</p>
<p>I kept the landline but got the minimalist plan with unlimited local calls in our area code. Use the cell phone and calling cards, yes calling cards, for long distance. Cell gives me unlimited minutes during off hours and weekends, when I make most of my long distance calls. Phone cards work seamlessly; 1 cent per minute. LD on land lines is a commodity business these days.</p>
<p>Many drop their landline, but so far, not me.
I operate a business from my brick home, and my cell is very hit-or-miss reception inside my home. I absolutely HATE trying to talk business on a phone, and having to shout to be heard, or to get disconnected in mid sentence because someone drove under a bridge.
Of course as cells and satellites continue to improve, I may change my mind later. For now, I like the dependability of the landline.</p>
<p>I went through this decision making a year ago and ended up doing the cable/internet/phone option but I think we’ll take a look at that when the 2 year contract is up. No friends call our land line anymore since we all have cell phones…only calls that seem to end up on our answering machine connected with the land line are solicitation calls from charity organizations and political mesages or wrong number calls…it’s starting to feel sillier and sillier to even have that phone …plus when power goes out the only phones that work are the cells anyway so we don’t even need the land line for emergencies anymore.</p>
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<p>You can do long distance for free with Google Voice if you have a landline. You tell Google the number to call and it calls your landline (it can also call your cell and work phones simultaneously). It then connects you with the number that you want to call. It also has voice mail and voice mail translation to text along with a bunch of other voicemail management features.</p>
<p>Someone told me that landlines are tied to the 911 system and they are also the numbers used for our county emergency call numbers. Also, your numbers will no longer be in a telephone book. Perhaps that argument is archaic because people give their numbers to the people they want to have them. I am keeping the land line.</p>
<p>We seem to be getting as much spam on cell phones that we do on the landline phone now. We signed up for the do not call landline registry but we still get political/charity/business relationship spam, some targeted by ethnic group. We’re getting these on our cell phones too - fortunately we don’t answer if we don’t know the number. On my phone, there are pictures of people or businesses on the phone for known numbers. I look them up on Google when I’m at a computer and they are invariable spam. Fortunately many enter information about these calls on the internet now so I don’t have to bother calling them back if they are known spam numbers.</p>
<p>Is there a reliable DNC for mobile phones?</p>
<p>Did this a year ago, never looked back. I was nervous about it but it has worked out wonderfully.</p>
<p>I keep a landline as well as a cell phone. Have been told that landlines may work when cells do not (although also heard texting may work when cell phone service doesn’t).</p>
<p>It also gives us the option to send faxes through the landline. Not everything can be sent via email fax.</p>
<p>For those of you who have given up landlines, how do you deal with only having one phone? When you’re at home, do you carry it with you from room to room?</p>
<p>We keep the landline but don’t have any long distance calling capability on it. Use the cell phone for that. Long distance calls sound better on my land line than on my cell (ATT–overloaded because of iPhone usage, I’m sure). So I get people to call long distance to the land line number if I am at home.</p>
<p>Our neighbor has had trouble with the phone-as-part-of-local-cable-provider package (it just cuts out for no reason sometimes), so I haven’t migrated to the cable provider.</p>
<p>Recently made it through Hurricane Ike–(visiting)–cell phones worked but electricity was out, so you had to find a way to recharge the phone; cable went down, so any cable phone would have gone down also; land line never went down and worked, even when the electricity to the house was out. Of course, you have to have a phone that has a cord, not a cordless handset.</p>
<p>Since we live in Southern California–wildfire and earthquake country, not to mention I live near a nuclear power plant–I think we’ll keep the land line. </p>
<p>But if I lived in an area of the country where natural disasters were not the 800 pound gorilla out there, I’d think going all cellular is an option.</p>
<p>My family has been cellphone only for five years now. Other than needing to send an occasional fax it’s been fine. I have a the cheapest cable-modem available for internet service and netflix.</p>
<p>@ellemenope</p>
<p>"Recently made it through Hurricane Ike–(visiting)–cell phones worked but electricity was out, so you had to find a way to recharge the phone; "</p>
<p>What did you do to recharge your phones when the electricity was out?</p>