Phone cord cutting

[BlueberryPie]

I'm in Colorado and I pay centurylink $40/mo for a wired phone which mostly gets spam calls, plus mis line and other "fees".
On top of that I pay $15 for long distance. It used to be pay-by-the-minute and it would be $3-$6 a month but they changed to a minimum monthly fee with more "free" hours than I care to use.

So it seems like an easy $50-$60 savings a month. I used to not trust cells for 911 but it's now mandatory to do proper location reporting. It's still possible the cell tower would be down when good ol' copper is not. That's why one of my phone is the an old unpowered (well powered by the phone line) no frills phone.

I do get my internet from Centurylink, but comcast regularly comes knocking with a similar price point (around $80/mo) but supposedly higher speeds.

Everyone in the household has a cell phone (using Ting, about $40 for 3 phones, but I may look at Mint)

I do call overseas to reach some family for an hour a week, sometime they call, but the way their international calling is set up, they get a surcharge for calling a cell phone, so I would have to call them all the time (not a big deal)


Any of you guys still value a land line or am I a dinosaur?

Would adding a free VoiP provider be worth the trouble? Maybe for the international calling? I could use zoom and the like but my parents are technophobes and having a hard time switching a non-telephone system.

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

As far as I am concerned, a LL is pretty useless with few exceptions. Most cell towers have generator backup, so loss of "cell tower" is pretty minimal as well.

The fears of location issues calling 911 with a smart phone are pretty baseless these days. I recently called 911 when I saw someone having some sort of episode (drug OD or medical...who knows) and when I completed the call...my screen showed EXACTLY where I was (like a Google map screenshot) and this made sense since the 911 operator didn't ask too many questions as to where it was occurring.

Edit: Screenshot showing 911 position example.

 

[LakeRat1]

There really has not been any need for a land line for 15 years ..... Cut the cord ..... Same goes for cable

 

[Scrapr]

You asked....yes you are a Dino. LOL

I have 2 Ooma devices that hook into any internet. Each system is about $5/mo. This way you are not dependent on an internet provider for your phone service. I have had the Ooma devices about 10-12 years. Works great. I have MIL on the "Premier" plan that you can block spam calls. IIRC that is about $15/mo

 

[qwerty3656]

My wife fought giving up the land line for years. I finally figured out I could link her cell phone to our home phone hand set (she likes using the home phone hand sets).

One issue is that our cell phones and internet are all with T-Mobile, so if T-Mobile is down we cannot communicate with the outside world.

 

[RetiredAndLovingIt]

You have options.
I have a free Google Voice number as my landline and use it all the time when I'm in the house. It rings to both my cellphone and the house wall phones. If you want to use it as a landline you need to buy a Polycom OBI200 Voip Adapter or if you just want it to ring to your cellphone, no extra equipment needed. After you buy the adapter there is nothing else to pay, it's totally free and I love it. I put $10 on Google back in 2012 for international calls to the UK and still have $4 left. I no longer use them for international calls, I call through Facebook app for free but here is a link to their rates
https://voice.google.com/u/0/rates

What countries do you call internationally? Some cellphone plans include certain countries, for example with Tello all calls to USA, Canada, China, Mexico, and Romania are included in their plan minutes.

 

[ArmchairMillionaire23]

Any of you guys still value a land line or am I a dinosaur?

As far as I am concerned, a LL is pretty useless with few exceptions.

There really has not been any need for a land line for 15 years ..... Cut the cord ..... Same goes for cable

A land line is not useless if you like vintage rotary-dial phones. We have three of them in our home. (kitchen, office, and upstairs bedroom) And they all work just as well now as when they were built. (two are from 1964 and one is from 1984) We get through life just fine without mobile phones. We find life's a lot less stressful and a lot more laid-back this way.

Of course, we're lucky enough to have a fiber-optic line for our internet and still have a copper line for the phones.

 

[TrvlBug]

We have a landline, old technology, not VOIP, because:

1. Cell reception in our home sucks. Most neighbors also have a landline for that reason .

2. Spam/scam calls mostly limited to landline as our cell numbers are limited to family and friends and a few trusted others.

3. During fire season, our area gets power shut off for days. Landline works; cells don't. They clearly don't have sufficient battery backup in our area.

 

[OldShooter]

We ported our landline number to Ooma, have bought the premium service and are quite happy. Spam screening is spotty because the spammers continuously change the caller id numbers they use, but that is not Ooma's problem. Voice mails and a 100% call log are available on the internet so that is handy when we are traveling. We have reasonable cell coverage at home but the Ooma VOIP calls are usually less troublesome.

Ooma's international program rates are here: https://www.ooma.com/home-phone-service/international-plans/#intl-rates-telo So maybe that helps you, maybe not. We have Google Fi on our cell phones. They have a pretty good international program (https://fi.google.com/about/international-rates/). Calls to 50 countries are free on their unlimited plan; maybe you'll get lucky there.

Ooma "Telo" basic boxes can be had on eBay for $20-30. There is a serial number on the bottom; you just sign into Ooma on the internet and enter that number to start the simple setup process.

 

[W2R]

Any of you guys still value a land line or am I a dinosaur?

I cancelled my land line six years ago, and I haven't needed it or missed it even once. If you're a dinosaur, then I guess am too.

I just use my cell phone.

I was paying $40/month for my land line, so let's see...

72 months * $40 = $2,880 saved so far.

 

[Markola]

I cancelled my land line six years ago, and I haven't needed it or missed it even once. If you're a dinosaur, then I guess am too. [emoji4]

I just use my cell phone.

I was paying $40/month for my land line, so let's see...

72 months * $40 = $2,880 saved so far.

We cut sometime in 2009, so at least $5,280. The only thing that concerns me a little is 911 knowing where we are but I’ve tried to program our phones correctly. I appreciate ExFlyBoy5’s screenshot.

 

[ArmchairMillionaire23]

I cancelled my land line six years ago, and I haven't needed it or missed it even once. If you're a dinosaur, then I guess am too.

I just use my cell phone.

I was paying $40/month for my land line, so let's see...

72 months * $40 = $2,880 saved so far.

We cut sometime in 2009, so at least $5,280

Using that logic...

We did not get cell phones in 2009. As of 2020 the average cost of a 2-line plan was $113 a month. Average it out to $50 per month per line and we saved $14,400 by not having mobile phones over the past 12 years. And that doesn't even include the cost of the phones.

 

[Markola]

We pay $25/ cell line but YMMV. You really don’t have cell phones?

 

[Music Lover]

A land line is not useless if you like vintage rotary-dial phones. We have three of them in our home. (kitchen, office, and upstairs bedroom) And they all work just as well now as when they were built. (two are from 1964 and one is from 1984) We get through life just fine without mobile phones. We find life's a lot less stressful and a lot more laid-back this way.

They aren't completely useless, but they are useless when you're not home and for us that's a deal breaker. We're outside or away far too much (we have acreage and a cabin) for a land line to be of any practical use. Also, we both have aging parents that rely on us and they have to be able to contact us at any time.

I got a cell phone for my convenience, not the convenience of others...it's completely stress free because I alone determine when it gets used.

We do have a vintage rotary phone in the sunroom... but it's for display purposes only

 

[ArmchairMillionaire23]

We pay $25/ cell line but YMMV. You really don’t have cell phones?

Technically we have a Trac-Fone that we bought back in 2011 for around $20 at WM. It doesn't have the Internet and the screen's about 1-1/2" square. We've never texted with it. It stays turned off unless we go out of town for an overnight trip. We were paying $4 a month to keep it active. For this year and next year it went up to around $5.50 a month. (we extended the service for two years with a coupon) I turned it on back in January so we could extend the service but that's the last time we used it. Before that I think we used it back in February of 2020, before Covid put an end to our travelling.

Not having a mobile phone for us is just a better lifestyle. We can go for walks or a drive and nobody bothers us. I see coworkers texting and talking on their phones throughout the day and they seem to get stressed out a lot.
When the wife and I get home we actually get to talk to each other and tell each other about our respective days. That's actually nice.

My wife's philosophy is that people got along just fine without mobile phones for years and years. I tend to agree with her. But we also accept that at some point in the future we may have to actually get a smartphone or even one for each of us once it becomes mandatory to have one due to 2FA which is already enough of a pain.

 

[OldShooter]

We pay $25/ cell line ...

For reference, with two lines on Google Fi and all the taxes we pay about $45/month plus $10/gig for data consumed. On average (2 years/report from Google) our data consumption costs us $1/month.

There are cheaper options bur for us the Fi international coverage is the killer feature since we have typically traveled internationally about twice a year. No buying SIM cards, no paying through the nose for calls, data cost same as we pay in the US.

 

[Music Lover]

Not having a mobile phone for us is just a better lifestyle. We can go for walks or a drive and nobody bothers us. I see coworkers texting and talking on their phones throughout the day and they seem to get stressed out a lot.
When the wife and I get home we actually get to talk to each other and tell each other about our respective days. That's actually nice

You can still do that with a cell phone. It's not in the manual, but you get to decide when and how to use it.

 

[ArmchairMillionaire23]

They aren't completely useless, but they are useless when you're not home and for us that's a deal breaker.

We do have a cordless phone/answering machine combo for when we're not home or if we have to "press 1 for this option, press 2 for another option", etc... That can't be done with rotary phones. (I tried)

 

[REWahoo]

My wife's philosophy is that people got along just fine without mobile phones for years and years. I tend to agree with her.

She is absolutely correct. People also got along without running water, indoor plumbing, antibiotics, motorized transportation, and a host of other "modern conveniences". It's great we all have the freedom to pick and choose which of these we want to use, at least to some degree.

 

[cathy63]

I'm in Colorado and I pay centurylink $40/mo for a wired phone which mostly gets spam calls, plus mis line and other "fees".
On top of that I pay $15 for long distance. It used to be pay-by-the-minute and it would be $3-$6 a month but they changed to a minimum monthly fee with more "free" hours than I care to use.

So it seems like an easy $50-$60 savings a month. I used to not trust cells for 911 but it's now mandatory to do proper location reporting. It's still possible the cell tower would be down when good ol' copper is not. That's why one of my phone is the an old unpowered (well powered by the phone line) no frills phone.

I do get my internet from Centurylink, but comcast regularly comes knocking with a similar price point (around $80/mo) but supposedly higher speeds.

Everyone in the household has a cell phone (using Ting, about $40 for 3 phones, but I may look at Mint)

I do call overseas to reach some family for an hour a week, sometime they call, but the way their international calling is set up, they get a surcharge for calling a cell phone, so I would have to call them all the time (not a big deal)


Any of you guys still value a land line or am I a dinosaur?

Would adding a free VoiP provider be worth the trouble? Maybe for the international calling? I could use zoom and the like but my parents are technophobes and having a hard time switching a non-telephone system.

In your situation, I'd look at Comcast and see what they'll do to get a new customer. You may find that it's cheaper to get a phone/internet/TV bundle from them than it would be to just drop the phone service from Centurylink. Prices will go up after a year, and you can always drop the phone service then or switch back to Centurylink if they offer you a better deal then. If you don't have or want cable TV, then it's probably better to just drop the phone service from Centurylink. Comcast probably isn't that much cheaper than what you have for just Internet and phone.

If you drop the existing phone service and want to keep the number, transfer it to a free VOIP offering such as Google Voice. If you want to make/receive calls with VOIP using your existing landline phones, then get an Obi or Ooma device. Otherwise you can use Google Voice from an app on your cell phones, computers, tablets and it acts just like a landline to the people on the other end of the call.

 

[RetiredAndLovingIt]

If you are interested in transferring your landline number to Google Voice, there are steps you need to take, you first must transfer to a cellphone carrier and then to GV who also now charges $20 to port the number.
https://cordcuttingreport.com/port-...:text=You can't port a,to Google Voice is $20.

 

[Trailwalker]

When we had Charter phone service, we would get all kinds of junk calls. We moved to Ooma, and the junk calls completely went away. I'm pretty sure Charter was selling our number to third parties.

Eventually, we found that we just weren't using the Ooma number so we went to cell only and haven't looked back for the last three years.

There is something I miss about landlines. There was a time when I could look up people up in a phone book. Cells have pretty much made that go away. Internet phone searches are not very reliable for residential customers.

 

[youbet]

Technically we have a Trac-Fone

Why do you do this when it is obviously such a huge mistake? You don't need it. You don't want it. It reduces your quality of life. Seems silly to have made this horrible decision and not correct it. Dump the cell phone.

 

[OldShooter]

I don't understand this notion that having a cell phone is some kind of an emotional or lifestyle burden. I have had quite a few of them over the years and every single one had an "off" button. I can understand not wanting the expense, but cost is the only issue I see. Is the phone worth the cost given rare use? Or not?

 

[Markola]

A land line is not useless if you like vintage rotary-dial phones. We have three of them in our home. (kitchen, office, and upstairs bedroom) And they all work just as well now as when they were built. (two are from 1964 and one is from 1984) We get through life just fine without mobile phones. We find life's a lot less stressful and a lot more laid-back this way.



Of course, we're lucky enough to have a fiber-optic line for our internet and still have a copper line for the phones.

I just don’t understand this. How are politicians raising money supposed to be able to text you?