OK, I’m thinking about cutting my last cord. My main home line is still with AT&T. Each month I look at the bill I ask “why?” I switched my business/home office line over to Vonage years ago and haven’t looked back. I get unlimited voice for $24.99 a month. It has worked out very well for me. My old bill back then was over $100/month for both voice and fax lines and that didn’t even include the separate Sprint long distance bill. Now it’s under $50 for both. Plus no long distance charges.
The one feature AT&T offers that I can’t seem to find via the VoIP/Digital companies is “Privacy Manager”. I pay for this service each month (in my package of services) to cut down on solicitors. Rather than just block their calls if they don’t display their number to my callerID, it plays a recording something to the effect of “your name or number was not recognized, please state your name after the beep and you call will be put through.” At this point a solicitor or automated caller will hang up. A legitimate caller will say their name and all is good. I have no idea of how many calls this blocks as the phone never rings if they don’t state their names. But I would hate to be inundated by a rash of solicitors if I switch over to Vonage or Comcast.
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Vonage or Comcast
Vonage is certainly cheaper! Their unlimited service is $24.99/month. Comcast digital voice has introductory offers, but once that period has past, the rate jumps up to $39.99/month. However, Comcast seems to offer a lot more call blocking features, although none of them seem to be as good as Privacy Manager. It seems that you can either block blocked calls or not. There is no compromise. Even though I’m a Comcast TV and Internet customer, their combined packages don’t seem to bring the price down far enough to be in-line with Vonage. There is one thing about the Comcast service that I do like and that is they will send someone out to wire the new Cable/Voice modem to your existing telephone jacks. So once my phone number is ported over, it would be no physical difference to how I use the phone now. My February AT&T bill came in at $46.21 (January was $67.97 and then I called them to cut some stuff out and move to a different plan.) and that’s with no long distance as I try to do all my long distance calling either on my Vonage line or my cellphone. The other thing that bugs me is Zone Calls! There are usually anywhere from $2-$10 of Zone Calls on my bill each month because we may dial a number that is in the same area code, but just far enough away to be charged as a Zone Call and then by the minute.
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Do I really even need a landline anymore?
My buddy Bruce sent out an email to all of his friends announcing that his home number was being disconnected and he gave out his and his wife’s cell numbers. His reason was that now that his daughter had gone off to college and it was just the two them, they couldn’t really think of any reason to keep the landline.
Everyone here at my house has a cellphone (yes iPhones). We all have our own numbers and our friends and family members know our numbers and call us. Other than the landline being used by the alarm system and a couple of older TiVos (that are slated to be replaced this year), do I really need one? Cell reception is 5 bars here in the house. I even get great reception in the basement. If I kill the landline, what am I giving up other than another bill? I will still have my office Vonage line if I need that to feel like I’m on a real phone.
The weird thing about losing your landline is, there’s no longer any way to call “the house.” I call my brother, or his wife, but they have no “home” phone, so I can’t just call him and chat with whoever answers — the kids, his wife, whoever. There’s no more serendipity factor. It reminds me of online newspapers, which encourage targeted news reading, rather than scanning headlines and discovering news you didn’t know you’d find interesting.
I my family ever kills the landline, I’ll never again have those casual chats with my inlaws or my wife’s or kids’ friends.
Not a really serious drawback, but something I’ve noticed, and I that I’ll miss about landlines.
I ponder the same question every month, and I’ve kept my landline for two reasons. First, I live in Florida and we have power outages fairly regularly. We’ve had extended outages (more than a day) occasionally. During one hurricane, we lost power for four days. With a copper-wire landline phone, we don’t have to worry about losing phone or charge on our cell phones. The phone will work.
The other reason we’ve kept our landline is Vonage still isn’t able to convert our home number to their service (we have a different vonage number). I’m not sure why, but until that works, we’ll keep the landline. Until then, we have our landline phone on super basic service with only call forwarding, which comes to about $17/month before taxes ($30/month after taxes). The landline is forwarded to our Vonage line, which then displays caller ID, etc. much more cheaply.
One thing I have had personal experience with – storms. The land lines seem to survive these better than cell phones. There is also the 911 issue. Don’t know if vonage or the other voips have gotten around that.
Terry, I’d check out adding a line to your vonage service, it might only be an extra $10-$15 per month to have two lines instead of only the one single line. They can likely port your current home number over to the second line. I can’t offer any suggestions on the privacy manager feature but when I had vonage for about two years as my primary home phone, I registered it on the do not call list and never had a problem. Plus, it is extremely easy to wire a vonage connection into all of the phone jacks in your house. Do a quick google search and you’ll likely find you already have everything you need to quickly do the job yourself. Plus with vonage I like the feature where if your internet service goes out they will automatically forward calls to your cell phone.
Terry,
If you’re worried about receiving unsolicited marketing calls sign up for the National Do Not Call Registry. I signed up years ago and I very rarely receive marketing calls. Sure, the stray one gets in there every so often, but only a few calls a year. Here’s the link:
https://www.donotcall.gov/
Terry, check out ooma.com.
About $200, and the premier upgrade is $99/year has nice blacklisting feature for unsolicited calls, amoong other things. Ooma paid for itself in 3 months of no Verizon phone bills.
T –
I was JUST talking to my wife about our phone/dsl/directv package.. thinking also of losing the phone and directv for DSL and CELL only… trying to save some money…
Another thought would be tmobile @ home… if one has tmobile – which we do… $10 on top of the tmobile bill.. but its technically voip..
ooma.. gotta check that out again..
Oh.. and thinking of using boxee on a mini for the kids….
I’ve been saying the same thing for years . . . but . . . When I go to talk to the companies (verizon and MSN) about doing this they tell me that I can’t. I don’t know where you live, but if you live in a more rural area, like me, you would be stuck without internet too. My phone/internet company tells me that because I’m using DSL they’ll give me phone, phone and internet, but I can’t pay for just the internet, and if I switch ISPs, I switch e-mail addresses too. I don’t know if it’s just another one of their money-making techniques, but it’s working. The worse part is I still can’t get fiber in my area after it’s been promised for a few years. Stupid companies, it never seems as though they can just give us what they want. But what are we going to do? They have us by the pants . . . I’m certainly not going without internet, so I have to go with phone.
I’m in the same boat as Trenton. I live outside of Knoxville, TN, and the community where I live is serviced by TDS, which bought out a mom-and-pop telco many years ago that had an exclusive agreement for the area. As a result, I have zero options for internet other than TDS, Comcast or satellite. Give up my landline and I have to either get ultra-expensive satellite internet or go with Comcast and give up my DirectTV. Neither option is palatable to me.
Sometimes change isn’t as easy at we’d like. Haven’t been able to do any bundling, only saving we’ve been able to make is on long distance calls, where we use Jajah over the landline.
I’d like to go with Vonage but I’d need to have an extra At&T line since the existing line is needed for our DSL service. Solution we aim for is Uverse for TV & Internet which would allow the landline to switch to Vonage. But AT&T are slow in rolling out Uverse hereabouts…tsk tsk…
So what to so before getting there? – it’s a quandary, stay with the existing setup or, make interim changes for some minor savings (which usually require some time commitment).
I’ve not had a landline in about 8 years now and haven’t missed it one bit.
I live in a major city (Boston) with great cell reception for the most part and have never needed the land line. When I last had it all it got was telemarketer calls and calls from people who didn’t for some reason want to call my cell.
If for some reason you have DSL, almost all companies now offer dry-loop DSL (ie DSL without having to also pay for a phone line).
Just beef up your cell plans a little bit which will on average save you more than you were paying for the landline.
Like most people I know, 90% of the calls coming in on my cell phone are going to be in my address book and if the call is not, it doesn’t get answered.
Why even go with Vonage? VOIP and iPhone are all we have in our house. With three kids with cellphones I just could not pay 300 bucks a year for a landline that was only used when my mom called us.
I switched my land line phone number to vonage several years ago in Minneapolis. The means that I still have a “home phone” that people can call.
The do not call registry works pretty well, but if you ever give money to people, they are allowed to call because of prior contact, and they sure do.
I disconnected my land line in the basment where it comes into the house. I then just tapped the “phone out” from the vonage device into the existing phone network. Now all the phone jacks in the house are useable on vonage. No need to call someone to run new wires.
Well, I dumped Verizon and use Vonage (about 4 years now), but I only did so after Vonage got its 9-1-1 act together (i.e., implemented “enhanced 911” which means that if you dial and then croak they still know where you called from). But, while I’m far from a luddite, I hate talking on cell phones. First, I find that people call you not just when they want to talk but often when they’re doing other things; thus, I constantly hear “wait a minute” or “no, I was talking to the cashier”. Second, even though you can let calls go to voice mail, it feels to me that you’ve always got to answer that cell. Since people expect you to have it with you, it no longer suffices to say “I was not at home when you called” or, as I do, “My cell was turned off”. Third, I agree with the commenter who said it’s nice to “surprised” (sometimes) with regard to who is calling. Fourth, as others have noted, all you need to do is get on the “do not call” registry if you want to block the calls. Works very, very well. Fifth, as a society many of us don’t know how to talk on cell phones: we’re too loud, too personal, and use the phone in places that, surprisingly, are annoying. For example, you would think that a gym with the music and other sounds would be a place where using a cell phone would be no big deal — but it’s totally the opposite! Everywhere we go we have to hear someone’s silly ringtone … which all leads me to the belief that in about ten years you will see a new business arise: for lack of a better phrase these will be called “cones of silence”. The cones will be in airports, malls, office buildings, etc; they will be spaces where no electronic device can be used and where the “service” is simply the sound of silence. Just as deforestation is occurring around the world, silence is disappearing, too. I’ll stop here before I link all this to solar flares ….
Hey Terry,
Just sharing —
One of the things they have here in the Philippines is a wireless landline. Basically, they put SIM cards on wireless phones (so you could use your existing GSM cellphone) and put a sim card there.
The main difference is that the number on the SIM card is a land-line number and not a cell phone number. Therefore, no long distance charges will apply!
Of course, that’s also because we don’t have unlimited night calls in our mobile plans here that’s why this is still a great way to get a landline here.
Mike