As is often the case, I agree with Glenn. They can have my land line when they pull the phone from my cold dead fingers.
Cells are simply not reliable enough for me to use them for everything, though I put up with it on a trip (when we were with T-Mobile, my cell phone didn’t even work in the house). I wonder how many kids who have grown up with cell phones for voice and texting take their idiosyncrasies and unreliability for granted, because they don’t have that much experience with a reliable and clean line? Plus, during the hurricanes, when all else failed, including power, cell service was out, but I always had phone service plus DSL on my land line. It allowed me to stay on line, by using a laptop and a voltage inverter plugged into the car.
The technology may continue to improve to the point at which I no longer feel the need for a land line, but we’re nowhere near it yet, in my opinion.
me too, and I go so far as to make sure we always have a non-cordless phone plugged in somewhere. the single justification for me is 911. You can’t forget your landline at work or in the car, and you never forget to charge its battery, so 911 will always work from that ancient relic.
Agreed. We’re now better than 20 years into cell phone service as a mass market communications medium and it’s still, IMHO, a tin-cans-and-string-quality technology. The wretched and non-standardized user interfaces of these half-engineered pieces of tinny plastic crap are just the icing on the turd cake that is wireless telecom.
We’re now better than 20 years into cell phone service as a mass market communications medium and it’s still, IMHO, a tin-cans-and-string-quality technology.
Some of this is a factor of how lousy US Carriers are at running cell services. I’m still shocked at how bad services are, even in large cities, compared to anywhere in Western Europe.
UI aside; unreliable SMS transfer, poor voice quality, daily dropped calls, bad signals, all standard even in technology savvy places like Seattle, San Diego, the Bay Area etc…
No British operator, for example, could advertise on coverage or fewest dropped calls – those things aren’t items to compete on, they’re taken as standard.
I’m actually going to cut my land line this week in fact and go purely cell based for my personal communications. I will still leave just data service to my house through DSl. But the only calls I get on my land line phone anymore are telemarketers. Even after adding my number to the do not call list.
My experience has been that during power failures after hurricanes not only does cable Internet fail but so does DSL. But landline and dialup service remained available.