Ditch landline for cell phone + cordless units?

[Bestwifeever]

Both my kids have landlines, one for working from home and the other, I don't know, for emergencies as they have small children, or it dropped the price of internet and cable (the "triple package" is cheaper many places--go figure), or it figured into a security system. So the percentage might be higher than we expect.

 

[JoeWras]

Cell phones stink when you are talking with people with hearing issues.

Heck, cell phones stink many times for non-hearing impaired calls.

This is why we haven't dropped land line yet. We have family who have impairments both in hearing and cognition. It just adds another barrier to have a bad connection.

Worst yet, many times the bad connection is just one way. You may hear everything fine, but on the other side, it sounds like you are talking under dirt. Please remember this when you call me with your phone and I sound fine. Guess what, you don't.

Sadly, this has been a trend in many cases. "Just give it to me for free, cheap or easy, and I don't care what it looks like or sounds like."

That said, we'll probably be dropping landline soon. Cell phone voice quality has gotten better and will continue. VoLTE is rolling out and will help.

 

[W2R]

Cell phones stink when you are talking with people with hearing issues.

Heck, cell phones stink many times for non-hearing impaired calls.

This is why we haven't dropped land line yet. We have family who have impairments both in hearing and cognition. It just adds another barrier to have a bad connection.

Worst yet, many times the bad connection is just one way. You may hear everything find, but on the other side, it sounds like you are talking under dirt. Please remember this when you call me with your phone and I sound fine. Guess what, you don't.

Sadly, this has been a trend in many cases. "Just give it to me for free, cheap or easy, and I don't care what it looks like or sounds like."

That said, we'll probably be dropping landline soon. Cell phone voice quality has gotten better and will continue. VoLTE is rolling out and will help.

I had an AWFUL problem with voice transmission on my iPhone 5S. Usually people couldn't hear me unless I yelled. I have a soft voice compared with most women, and had to yell so loud to be heard, that it was difficult for me and making me hoarse. Sometimes I couldn't hear them, either. Finally after a couple of years of this, with it getting even worse, I was fed up. I switched from Verizon to Cricket, got a free LG Spree phone, and magic happened!!! On my free phone I can hear beautifully and even the quality of voices is much better. People can hear me, too. Problem solved.

Don't know if it would help for you, but thought I would mention it.

 

[target2019]

And that was said on the basis of data compiled for a CDC study and then described in that article. Depending on how lightning-fast the CDC gets their studies completed and released, that data used in the study could be maybe 2-3 years old already. With landline rates going up so much in the past few years, I'm thinking that the national percentages may be lower by now.

July 2016 - Dec 2016.
Yes, the number of adults with cell phone is going up.

 

[donheff]

I went with Magic Jack for my home phone. Cheap and was able to use the house wiring for a wall phone plus a couple of existing cordless bases and satellites. I don't like the idea of dedicating a cell phone to serve as our "home" number. I could see dumping the magic jack and not having a "home" number at some point.

 

[mpeirce]

Cell phones stink when you are talking with people with hearing issues.

Heck, cell phones stink many times for non-hearing impaired calls.

...

That said, we'll probably be dropping landline soon. Cell phone voice quality has gotten better and will continue. VoLTE is rolling out and will help.

This is a combination of you-get-what-you-pay-for and needing to upgrade to the latest phones.

My 2 year old iPhone 6S+ supports both WiFi calling and Voice over LTE (ATT calls this HD voice). Both offer excellent voice quality *IF* the phone on the other end also supports it. If you are calling a friends old flip phone, there isn't much anyone can do.

Also, non-phone phone apps like FaceTime Audio (and Skype?) also offer very high quality audio.

I mainly call family and we all have iPhones. The calls are better quality than the good old days of land lines and Western Electric phones.

 

[mpeirce]

Cell phones stink when you are talking with people with hearing issues.

See above about the latest technology. There's been a lot of work done concerning integrating cell phones and hearing aids.

For example: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/iphone/hearing/ and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201466

That being said, my DF still just uses speaker phone to talk because of his hearing aids - even though I've shown him how to get a better result using Bluetooth.

 

[Lsbcal]

I went with Magic Jack for my home phone. Cheap and was able to use the house wiring for a wall phone plus a couple of existing cordless bases and satellites. I don't like the idea of dedicating a cell phone to serve as our "home" number. I could see dumping the magic jack and not having a "home" number at some point.

One reason a cell phone might be good for a home number (assuming one wants a home number) is that it might be a way to reduce robocalls. Mr. Number is something DW has been trying out on her cell, as the last few months she has been plagued by robocalls. Also Nomorobo is being developed for Android phones and is in test phase now. I guess Nomorobo is available on Iphones.

Note, if I could not get a cheap cell phone and and service for $10/month it would not be worthwhile. Since I can, it might be a nice step before going with the Voip stuff suggested above.

 

[imoldernu]

Over my head...
We have Comcast 25Mbps and use Vonage. Conversations with my kids on their "smart"phones are broken up and static filled, but when talking to people who are on landlines, the reception is perfect. Know that some of this happens when the kids use bluetooth, but it's bad even when they don't.

The second part that I don't understand is why my conversations over Skype, are perfect, with no static at all.

 

[ejman]

Over my head...
We have Comcast 25Mbps and use Vonage. Conversations with my kids on their "smart"phones are broken up and static filled, but when talking to people who are on landlines, the reception is perfect. Know that some of this happens when the kids use bluetooth, but it's bad even when they don't.

The second part that I don't understand is why my conversations over Skype, are perfect, with no static at all.

I use Messenger for calls to family and it's usually crystal clear at both ends. But it seems that calls using the cell networks are much lower in quality, particularly when calling some iphone users (like my daughter) from my android phone. The weird thing is that I can hear her just fine (and vice versa) when she uses Messenger. I can barely understand her when she is using her regular cell network. No idea why.

 

[JoeWras]

I kind of worked in this field for a while, and I could give you a lot of mumbo jumbo about it. It is complicated. In simpler language, it goes like this:

1) the technology is improving, hold on, but you may be on some old tech

and 2) the devices attempt to sync up with each other to use the best underlying methods of communication, sometimes when they can't sync properly (maybe due to some junk in the middle of the connection), they default to a very simple technology that is, well, crap.

 

[CaptTom]

Almost everyone I know who has traditional landline service gets it through their cable company.

Good point. I was talking about the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System.)

Cable companies are pushing their bundled VOIP service. I don't know how far they've gotten, I'd guess around here it's quite a bit less than half the land lines.

Up here in New England, outside the major cities, most communities only have one cable service available. From my experience, it's less reliable than the POTS service. Cables are run on utility poles, and use powered equipment out on the poles. Either a downed wire or a power outage at any given pole takes out a lot more cable subscribers than POTS customers. That's one reason people keep POTS lines.

For me anyway, VOIP through the cable company or any other service using my cable Internet connection (skype, etc) is less reliable than POTS or cell phones.

Looking forward, I see cable going the way of POTS as the cellular network continues to improve and build out. As I understand it, in third-world countries with regions where POTS was never built in the first place, the populace has gone straight to cellular technology, leap-frogging both POTS and wired cable.