My family, not long ago and after much research and a nagging sense of FUD, finally cancelled our home landline phone. It was equal feelings of “Oh man, what if there’s an emergency and we can’t call 911!?!?!” and “Stick it, CenturyTel, I’m keeping my money!” But I think we made a good decision, and here are several reasons why.
The biggest hold out for us from going cellphone-only was the “emergency” need for a phone line. That’s the thing about having a landline, you can pretty much count on there ALWAYS being a dial-tone. Example scenarios (yeah, the mind can think up a LOT of schtuff like this):
- I and/or my wife are home with the kids, and one or both of us were incapacitated, how would the kids call 911 quickly?
- We have a house fire, everyone get out quick! Could we call 911?
- Wife and I are on a date, kids are at home, can we be sure they can call us in an emergency?
What if the cell service were down or the cell phone didn’t work?! Can you realistically count on a cell phone working all the time? What if it loses power? What if the electricity is off for days on end, how will you charge it?
Here’s what we decided. We’ve had three cellular lines for some time (mine, wife’s, and for another family member), and worked it out last year so that we would have that third line/phone at our home almost all the time. This has become our “emergency” line, since that phone very rarely leaves the house, and is definitely there when my wife and I are both gone from home. That phone has a great battery and can go like four days of being constantly on, and I bet if we kept it turned off (like during an extended power outage) except to make a call or two, it could go a couple weeks with enough juice. Add to that our other two phones, and I think that’s covered. (Note to self, get a big 2Kva UPS for the computers and to stand-in in the event of a long power outage.)
I also can’t forget that we’ve got many neighbors nearby. If I conk myself out or have some sort of debilitating physical issue, it’s going to take an ambulance or first-responder quite a few minutes to get to me. So the minute or so it takes for someone in the house to run over to a neighbors house (IF none of three cell phones in the house will work) probably isn’t going to make much difference anyway. Say we had a fire and all had to get out of the house quickly and can’t call 911, I bet that extra minute running over to the neighbors wouldn’t make that much difference either.
Those are just a couple examples. It’s really playing the odds game. What are the odds that some event will happen where you MUST make a call out, and THREE phones are not working OR the cell tower is down AND you can’t find a neighbor home?
(As an aside, I talked with our local emergency response office that handles 911 calls about how well cell phones work, and if I could somehow register my address with them. They didn’t have the option of linking my home address with the cell number, but they seemed assured that they could triangulate the phone’s position if they were called. I think this is dubious of the phone is inside my home, unless cell phones use some “magic” form of GPS that can penetrate building structures. Oh well.)
I hate to mention this right after a paragraph that takes into consideration our human lives… but this point affects me in the wallet. 🙂 We’ve been dumping probably around an average of $28 a month over to CenturyTel or the previous phone carrier since… well, since forever. That’s just for basic service, no extras. Since my wife and I have had cell phones since at least 2002, we’ve been paying on that, too. True, considering the level of cell phone service back then, and the poor coverage even up til this past year, we couldn’t have gone cell-phone-only any sooner than now. It’s just such a great feeling to use that $28 every month for some other budget area! Everyone likes to save!
On a social aspect of killing off our landline, I hated answering that phone. I would bet that 95% of the time, it was a call for my wife. I don’t mind not being popular, trust me! 🙂 So I was for the vast majority of the time passing the phone to her, or having to take a note to give to her later. How many times I SO wanted to say “Can you just call her on her cell phone?” It was a relief to tell people, after we cancelled the landline, if you want my wife, here’s her number. If you want me, here’s my number. The third number we don’t give out at all. Sweet deal!
Along with this, we had to decide which number we needed to put down for business use. It didn’t take much of an argument (from me) for us to decide that it should be my wife’s phone. Sweet, again! I dallied with the option of setting up a virtual number, like Google Talk, to use as our “home” number for businesses to call us. My thinking was that it wouldn’t be a “real” number and had options like to send all calls to voicemail if we wanted, and could also do call-blocking, but my wife thought it was irrelevant. I see her point… now that we have number portability, her number will always be hers, like mine will always be mine. I’m just protective of my number and only want family and friends and people at work to have it.
