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Last Holdout Cries Uncle

olbriar

olbriar

 
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Well folks, after a 50 year run with my home phone, I pulled the plug this morning. I was off work today and received five spam phone calls within an hour's time. The number is on the no call list but that's a joke. Besides the price of the home line, we never use the darn thing.
There is no telling how many ties I severed this morning but it's a done deal. I gathered up the answering machine/master phone and all of it's slaves and ceremoniously slam dunked them in my dumpster. I'm now $400 richer a year and I will gain five minutes a day of my life back (the time I spend daily deleting the spam from my answering machine) I'm feeling good.

How many of you still have a landline? I may be the last dinosaur to drop my service. Just curious....
 
Might be hard to believe but it's around 50/50 right now, with cell phone only having just surpassed landlines.

50.8% - only cellphone service in the latter half of 2016, the first time such households attained a majority in the survey.

45.9% - still have landline phones.

39% - both landline and cellphone service.

The remaining households have no phone service at all.

Source Article.
 
I've had the luxury of claiming my home phone as a business expense all of these years. It's not a total write off but it has helped to offset the wast of dollars on a little used service. The last couple of years it's become more of a pain than insurance (if you will)
I can't remember the last phone call I initiated on my land line. For that matter, it's rare that I have a genuine call when I'm home. I find a call on my answering machine now and then that I will acknowledge with a return call... from my cell phone. :)

Interesting stats @kate I have three living grown or should be grown children. None of them have a land line. At a gathering of friends last weekend I discovered I was the lone wolf still tethered to the old phone system. I was beginning to think I was the last fool on earth.
 
psionandy said:
If I want the broadband, and the cable (which i do) then they would charge me extra if I cancelled the phone service
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A few friends are like that now that I think about it. They have cable, internet and phone all bundled up and would pay more to disconnect the phone so they keep it. One of them is getting seriously annoyed with cable though so may ditch tv and phone and just get internet. If he does that I told him to port his phone number to Google Voice as he does use it. He said 90% of calls are marketing/spam/robo-calls so he'd probably just let the number go.
 
psionandy said:
Bizarrely, If I want the broadband, and the cable (which i do) then they would charge me extra if I cancelled the phone service... so I save around £50 a year by keeping the landline.
Click to expand...
Though there's nothing saying you have to plug a phone into the socket ;)

We still have enough friends or family members who will call from landlines that we keep it (not all will realise how much it's going to cost them to use a landline to call our mobiles), though I personally don't make many calls from it. Anyway we need the line for the broadband, plus having it means there's some redundancy.
 
Unforgiven said:
I still have a landline, but more for the number I can give out that won't call my cell.
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Same here. We keep it mostly for appointment confirmation and reminders that we don't want on our cells. We pay less than $20/month for it and it has no long distance service. It's also nice to have when I have to send out a fax for whatever reason.

We could certainly cut the cord and not really miss it, but it's cheap convenience ... which is what makes America great (again?).
 
I still have a landline but the funny thing is I never use the home phone nor do I answer it..... lol Friends will be over and when I get a call it shows up on my tv who is calling and the number..... they'll ask me are you going to answer that , and my answer to them is always NO....... lol. I only delete my messages after the answering machine gets full.
 
those that are in a bundle situation...
cable internet
VT service
Phone
so that you can save on a 3 package solution...

for me... i was looking at the same situation when i killed off my phone...
for me.. Phone and VT service was NOT that important.
Phone.. obviously.. i had unlimited calls.. so what do i care for a landline?
TV programming.. i could get 99% of it off other internet based services. example: Netflix
Internet... i consume a lot.. more and faster is better!

so i went with only internet faster service....
looked for a service that stayed at same price (or lower) than the 3 packaged services.
 
I'm guessing that I've had the same cell number since 1985. I got the original brick when cell service was offered in my area. I had a two meter phone prior to that. I've had mobile phone access since 1978. I can't imagine life without mobile access.
 
I had service with Sprint starting in 1997-8, then switched to Verizon in, I think, 2001-2, I've had that number since then. I'm not sure if porting numbers was a thing yet but I either didn't or couldn't port them. I'd almost opt for couldn't because, you know, Verizon.

@dan330, I'm just internet and streaming now too (sort of, they haven't actually turned my tv service off but aren't billing for it! Go me! lol).

@olbriar My sister had a bag-phone in the late '80s early 90s, I recall her never using it because it was so expensive. She was working in the boonies of WV and had to drive up and down the mountains on very bad barely real roads. She got it for safety, or at least peace of mind.
 
Clementine_3 said:
@olbriar My sister had a bag-phone in the late '80s early 90s, I recall her never using it because it was so expensive. She was working in the boonies of WV and had to drive up and down the mountains on very bad barely real roads. She got it for safety, or at least peace of mind.
Click to expand...

I certainly get that. Glad she had it and I assume never needed it.
I worked construction.. still do. The need for communication in the field is huge. I needed a phone to coordinate material deliveries and meetings and such. I figured it would save me enough time to pay for itself especially considering it was a write off. I started out with a two meter phone. It was a radio that you could access a land line link with the keypad. It was iffy communication but fairly cheap. My wife was expecting when I took the leap for a cell phone. It was a more reliable communication though the cost was much more. Cost was not a factor... we were expecting. :)
 
We've been no landline since the household got computerized and ditched dial-up.
The wiring for the landline was switched to DSL.

I like it. I don't have to listen to the answering machine. I don't care about the others' messages (you could hear the message) Figured it was none of my business.
I never checked it anyway. You call me when I feel like answering or I don't.
I prefer texts anyway. Those can be answered at my convenience, too.
Then, too, with most of the phone (not VOIP) service you couldn't block the spammers or had to pay extra. Unlisted number didn't protect you from robodiallers.
 
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