Remember the days when you had to talk on a phone attached to a cord in your kitchen? Remember the days before caller ID, when you actually had to answer the phone to see who was calling? What a thought, huh? Ah… how things have changed.
If we had to guess, we bet hardly any of you have a landline phone anymore. Especially for those of us who travel full-time, or a good part of the year. What’s the use for one of those old things?
Please tell us below if you have a landline phone, or if you just use your cell phone. Maybe you’ll prove our guess wrong… who knows?
My “landline” is hooked up via the internet so it always travels with me
I can take my landline with me if I so desire. That is the number I give out for people I may or may not want to talk with and seldom do I take it with me.
The answer to the land line is no, when we first moved in 2016 we tried to get a home phone but ATT said after 3 tries we were 762’ from the end of the line(we live in the city limits of a small town in TN.) so we are “stuck” without a landline bill every month. There are advantages and disadvantages to not having a landline… give me a few days I may think of a disadvantage. Landlines are going the way of the pay phone booth. Walk into any truck stop that’s more than 20 years old and someplace you’ll see a wall that did have at least 20 pay phones on it. I wonder if the treasury noticed an increase in coin reserves when the pay phone disappeared? Even laundromats and car washes use plastic these days.
Speaking of “coins”, what happened to the “Great Coin Shortage of 2020”?
I hadn’t thought of that for a long while, but now I’m curious too – as I sit here with probably 50 lbs. of pennies in the basement . . .
I only have the cell phone for calls, but still have the availability of a landline. This is used for my WIFI connection. Rural community.
Have a land line for our S & B alarm system. Also use it sometimes when making a call from certain parts of our house due to poor cell reception/transmission. Only two people call in on that line, my wife’s sister and her friend, everyone else is spam and goes on unanswered.
You don’t need a landline for your alarm system..or at least I didn’t for mine. We put our landline on “vacation” status when we go south for the winter and the alarm company installed a gizmo so the alarm still functions. I think it’s hooked direct to a cell tower but not sure.
My internet is DSL but we no longer have a landline account for a phone. Unfortunately our DSL is through CenturyLink and is the slowest in their system because there is no financial gain for them to improve our bandwidth as we live so far out in the country. We can’t stream anything. It’s a good thing we don’t have to homeschool. It’s ridiculous to be so dependent upon a corporation deciding when to upgrade our area.
Although we live in an area of rural southern NJ farmland, it’s not really that rural. Regardless, we are in an area of poor cell phone connectivity. We prefer our land line when talking from home because we don’t have to put up with poor quality sound and dropped connections. We have phone/internet/tv through our cable provider. All work very well most of the time.
I have a landline to keep all the telemarketers gainfully employed, while they call me early in the morning if I try to sleep late, or every day at suppertime!
Got rid of my land line, newspaper and tv when the first Blackberry came out. Never looked back, well maybe rethought my decision. Bob, Boise Idaho
Option four;
Internet phone plus cellular phone
Agreed. Choice 4 for a VOIP; not really an old school landline.
Me too.
No landline, even though cell systems collapse in hurricanes. Once cell towers go down, it takes about a week or so for the COWS to show up. Then, connections are to first responders.
Our home phone used to be a “LAND LINE” meaning it was physically connected to a telephone pole or for others in more modern communities they are physical wiring but underground. Many years ago we changed our home land line phone to a Verizon router and it became usable anywhere anytime it was connected to 120 V power. It is only usable with voice, no data, no internet. Because we have an inverter in our DP our phone has rung all over the country on many of our travels while driving. Has come in handy many times. We also have cell phones but use our home phone number for specific needs. Stay safe, Stay well, Safe travels.
We actually do have a land line telephone. A ’50s Chicago Electric heavy black rotary dial desk-top telephone from my grandparents. It isn’t connected, but my grandchildren enjoyed playing with it probably as much as I did as a child.
We do not have reliable cell service at home – hence the landline.
First thing to go down in any emergency is the cell system so stay connected to my landline for that reason. As time goes on more and more people will drop landline but most emergency support services will stay with landline. This is the reason for me to stay with my landline, however I also have a cell phone.
This^.
Where we live in nw Montana cell service is spotty, at best. Without the Wi-Fi cell booster we have no cell service to speak of. The internet to drive the Wi-Fi comes over the phone lines. So we have both. As long as the power is on. When power goes out we swap cordless phone or for old fashioned plug in landline until power is back. Gotta have it for 911.
no, i have not had a land line in decades.
as a truck driver it is not worth the $$ to have one.
We had both a landline and cell phones for about 25 years. But, then we moved to be near our aging parents and had a house built. We decided then to not have a landline installed. It has made local services — plumbers, repairmen, and the like — a bit harder to convince that we are legitimate customers and not spammers, but not enough to add a landline. Recently, my 89-years-of-age mother had her landline number, which she had had since 1953, ported to a Jitterbug flip phone, so even she no longer has a landline.
I have had only a cell phone since 1992, when I started living full-time in an RV. At that time, only about 5% of the US population had cell phones.
At $68 a month, i finally dropped the land line. nobody other than telemarketers used it. Kinda like tv.never had cable because they brought it out to us 12 years after the subdivision went in and by then we had used Dish and Direct. When the digital tv came out and we could get 30+ channels we dropped that too. More money in my pocket and not glued to a chair watching senseless crap.
we had a traditional copper line from AT&T for decades. costs kept creeping up to the point that it was running just over $100 p/month. at the same time we were paying $50 p/m for an internet DSL line from Earthlnk. we wanted to make a change. we already had Comcast cable and Comcast was offering their “triple play” bundle of cable tv, internet and phone. so we canceled AT&T and Earthlink for a saving of $1800 p/year and went with the Comcast triple play which ended up costing *less* than what we had been paying for just cable tv. breaking down the monthly bill the cost of the Comcast “land line” (really a VoIP line…Voice Over Internet Protocol line) wasjust $7 p/m. a no brainer.
beyond the low price the Comcast “land line” has three major benefits for us. first, we could keep our mobile numbers private by using our LL as our contact number for businesses, health care and so on. second, we were able to configure the LL to also ring both of our mobile phones, a tremendous comvenience. lastly, we eliminated 99% of spam calls thanks to NoMoRoBo which came at no additional cost with the Comcast line.
No landline. I see no reason to have a monthly bill so telemarketers and spammers can call 24/7. Cell alone works for us.
I hate to tell you William, but the telemarketers already have access to cell phone numbers. You can register with the “do not call” service but it only slows them down. We have registered several times and still get calls.
Between our land line and 2 cells we average 10 spam calls a day – 15 during political seasons. Just recently I have received spam texts on my cell. I have registered to the “do not call” for both land line and cell. For some reason that seemed to make it worse.
Political calls are exempt from the Do-Not-Call list (naturally I won’t comment on the irony that lawmakers had to guarantee THAT loophole). I made a lot of ‘get out the vote’ texts to people in the lead up to Novembers election – if someone replied ‘Stop’ or ‘Remove’, their number was removed from the list.
That said, only telemarketers based in the US are beholding to the D-N-C list, and if you go through their routine, you’ll notice every sales rep has a South Asian (likely India, Pakistan or Bangladesh) accent. That’s because these centers use V0IP servers, and they pay minimum wage rates – for the whole day.
We winter in Baja Mexico. Our landline is tied to our internet service – a whopping deal at 389 pesos (less than $20!!),
We have a landline, with 7 extensions or handsets, which we have had since the 60’s. We also have TracFones. 1 Smart and 1 flip. They are used only for emergency service and when we are on the road. I have about 9,000 minutes and my wife has about 2,500 minutes on our cells.
The robocalls are just about enuff to make me rip the phone off the wall – but alas it is a “reliable” system from CenturyLink and their service is excellent if needed. $5.99 per call for directory assistance – because the phone book is so small you can’t read it anymore! Our internet is also thru CenturyLink.
Yes and no. My husband has had his landline number for 40+ years. He wasn’t ready to give it up and some things are tied to it. Plus occasionally a friend from the past will contact him. It was too expensive for the limited use so for $20/m we kept the number but there is a cell number behind it (don’t even know what it is). We rarely answer it. If it’s important or an old friend they will leave a message. We also give that number out if we need to supply a number for some reason, but don’t want them to have our cell number.
It would be interesting to see the answer by age group. Some of my grand-kids would not know what you are even asking about.
I only have the landline for our house alarm. We’d pay for a new system in a couple of years by not having the landline so I think we’re going to switch.
About a decade ago, land line phone prices went through the roof. MOST of the increases were due to “Taxes, Fees & Surcharges” ie NOTHING to do with providing phone service. Also back then, there was little if any “UNLIMITED” calls, texts and especially data (which is why SPAM calls were few to non existent). I dropped my Verizon land line “service” and ported that phone number to Cingular, which was acquired later by AT&T and finally, when AT&T “service” went to heck, got transferred to T-Mobile (who I’ve been with for 4+ years now). I (and I suspect MANY cell phone users) HATE to have to switch carriers. If a carrier simply treated people as VALUED customers, I believe MOST people would STAY with a carrier. Damn those idiot “bean counters”!
We keep our land line. I look at it as cheap insurance. If I call 911, they know where to show up, even if I cannot speak or be understood.
During the wildfires the cell service went down and many people didn’t know of approaching fires until sheriff using Hi/Lo alarm headed wound the street and over loudspeakers saying to evacuate. Land line cheap life insurance in my book.
I have a landline included with my internet/television bundle and our cell phones are no charge, unlimited use included in the package. If we go on the road, we can forward the landline to our cell phone, so we don’t miss those important extended auto warranty calls.
Richard, you may have just convinced me to get a landline again, never considered those auto warranty calls not to mention all the free stuff I learn I’ve won.
We haven’t had a landline since 2010.
Haven’t had a landline in over 20 years, and I work for the phone company!
We’ve used our mobile phones for everything, including internet hotspots when we are on the road. Verizon pulled every penny they could out of landline systems and put it into the wireless network buildout (and then sold their ‘rural’ areas to finance their 4G upgrade).
Telemarketers have servers that randomly dial numbers, so you get them on landline, mobile and VoIP services – but there is technology that can block them, but as with any arms race, they’ll figure a way around it eventually.
I tried to keep a land line when we first started full-time but the wire kept getting tangled in the 5th wheel’s tires.
😆 —Diane at RVtravel.com
I believe for this poll to make any sense it has to be rephrased, unless you are considering Internet Connected Phones, as Landline phones. It used to be that a Landline phone meant you connected “by physical wire” to the local telephone company. How do you define Bluetooth phones connected by wireless to a cable modem, which is a hard wire connection. It seems as if this poll was written by someone in my generation, Boomer. :).
I had a land line with AT&T for years and years. Then it stopped working and I called them to try and schedule service, only to be told that they coudn’t find my account! Never mind that I had the bill in my hand with my account numbers on it when I called them, for some reason they still couldn’t locate the account. Cue a phone call that lasted an hour and a half, multiple transfers, multiple messages left for ‘supervisors’. In the end nothing was ever resolved, none of the supposed supervisors ever returned my call. When I got the next bill in the mail I wrote a few choice thoughts in a letter telling them to cancel my service, and sent it back to them along with the unpaid bill. That whole experience left such a bad impression on me that I’ve sworn AT&T will never get another dime from me.
My Verizon cell phone has worked just fine.
Haven’t had a land line for at least 25 years.