I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.
I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.
When I can get FIOS, I’m totally ditching the landline I never use. Let the rent-seekers plunder elsewhere.
If I could get my landline number permanently set up to forward to my cell phone, I would drop landline service altogether.
BBB
bbbeard,
Google Voice will be accepting phone number transfers starting in September (so they say). Once they do you can move your number to them and install the Google Voice app on any Android or Blackberry phone. Apple isn’t playing ball yet, though I hope they will (I have an iPhone).
Skype has a greater range of frequencies than AT&T ever had, allowing it to capture the full range of the human voice. Over a decent cable or FiOS connection I find it better than a landline (assuming both participants are using Skype). Cell phones certainly have a “good enough” quality to them though.
Further, once voice becomes just a data app there’s nothing stopping a phone manufacturer from using more than the 22kbs that Verizon and AT&T currently limit their voice to. On a 3G or 4G network (heck, even EDGE) you could get much better fidelity than you get on cell phones now.
You got it backwards – it’s data that’s subsidizing voice these days. That’s where all the profit is for the phone carriers. AT&T’s margins on data plans are 25%. We’ll be better off when this ends. Cross subsidization interferes with the clarity of the market signals, making markets less efficient.
All I know is that I wouldn’t want to have my cell (AT&T) as my sole phone service. It would really suck. Perhaps that will change with a tech advance, but that’s the way it is now, for me.
A couple of things.
Can you get centralized monitoring for a home security system without a landline?
One section I will always remember from Robert X Cringely’s “Accidental Empires” is where he is talking to some “computer geek” about “desktop publishing” a scientific or math paper or book using LaTeX, the Computer Modern font, and (what was back in that day) the latest 300 dpi laser printer.
The computer geek was talking about how the output “looked typeset” and Cringely was thinking about how that smudged print didn’t look anything close to typeset, or at least according to the standards for the publishing business ever since Mr. Guttenberg. The computer geek must have been seeing how the LaTeX Computer Modern in 10 point on a 300 dpi laser printer looked “typeset” as a result of a kind of geek’s forward-looking wishful thinking.
That the speech quality from a mobile phone is anything close to natural-sounding or even intelligible without the use of a lot of standard phraseology, that is also a case of techno wishful thinking.
The split between landline and mobile has increased since 1) landlines have gone digital and gotten rid of analog microwave transmission (remember MCI?), and 2) mobile went from narrow band FM (noisy, but relatively undistorted) to whatever combination of low-rate speech coding and code-multiplexed digital transmission over the radio channel. Landline is actually halfway decent, certainly much better than “back in the day”, whereas mobile has gotten to the point where I want to ask people to call back on a landline.
We gave up a normal land line 5 years ago.
Cells and cable phone have never let us down. Yes they’ve been down some, and as bad as customer service for cell phone and cable companies are, Bell South was worse, and they used cost me more for the added pleasure.
Well, the landline options available in my area are limited to VoIP over either cable or fiber. I had both, for a while. They tended to have the same digital distortion that I often get with my cell phone.
I felt the same way about land lines, until we finally realized that we would go months without ever touching our land line phone. Everything was done by cell. That’s when we got rid of it. The only calls coming through on it were telemarketing calls.
And we also have a cell based monitoring for our home security system. Apparently, that’s the growing trend given the common practice of cutting phone lines before attempting to enter a home.
I felt the same way about land lines, until we finally realized that we would go months without ever touching our land line phone. Everything was done by cell. That’s when we got rid of it.
Well, that’s the difference, I guess, and I suspect, it’s a lifestyle difference. I’m a consultant, and a hermit, and I don’t go out that much, and when I do, I often forget to take my cell. I just don’t consider it as essential as many do (and particularly many who grew up with them). Obviously, if I went months without using my land line, it would be a different story, but for me, it’s my primary line when I’m not traveling. And it works great, with no call drops. Except when I’m talking to someone on a cell…
One other point. I can just turn on the speaker at home, and I don’t have to wear an earwig, or any painful thing in my ear(s) (are there really people who can wear buds for more than an hour or so without pain?), and don’t have to tie up a hand with the phone.
I continue to contend that people are putting up with shitty tech because they have no experience with good tech.
I declined to set up a home landline when I moved 5 years ago, going cell-phone only for the entire family. I had a landline for my home-based business, but we switched that over to Vonage and have it ring the cell phones simultaneously so that we can take business calls when out in the field, which is most of the time. In my case, I avoided the charge for the personal line, and dumped the $160/mo business line/fax in favor of a $39/mo Vonage account. The cell phones are a wash as I would have them in either case. I’m quite pleased with the current arrangement, although yes, cell phones do suck.
I, personally, don’t understand households of multiple people or with families that have no landline. It used to be that you could call one number, that was attached to a physical house, and talk to anyone in that house that was present at the time. Now, if I want to drop by a friend’s house, I have to call his cell phone, and if he doesn’t answer, then his wife’s cell, and if she doesn’t answer, I give up. And half the time, they just forgot to take their cell phone with them to whatever room they wandered off to in the house, even though they’re home.
I can’t imagine how much of a pain it would be for a school to get a hold of a child’s parents if there was no landline for them to call.
And, I agree with Rand. Even though I use my cell for outbound long-distance calls, the quality of my landline is leaps and bounds above it, and I can have as many or as few handsets in my house as I see fit, and run a line out to my garage if I really want to. With a cell phone, if the battery dies, I’m SOL until it charges back up, and the handset isn’t nearly as cheap and easy to replace as a landline phone if something bad happens to it.
Good points, John B. More arguments against cells.
Other benefits of landlines include emergency services (911) and backup for power outages. In my home, all but one wireless remote can function using the -48 Volts from the telco. And I find that DSL fast enough for the Web.
Verizon wants me to upgrade to FIOS – however, the power backup is a local battery that is only specified to about 24 hours. In addition, the installation requires that I use their router, and they also insist on physically installing the software on the computer. I would consider FIOS if they would have a simple RJ-45 jack for the interface demarcation as with the RJ-11 jack for POTS. FIOS cost is a little more than POTS/DSL, but once I change, I can never go back.
In addition, when needing to make a good impression, like for a job interview, having a quality landline service is worth it. I agree with Rand (maybe because we’re old farts) that cell phones have their limitations.
The cost of a landline is insurance against emergencies. If your power is out for more than a day or two cell phones tend to become useless, because even if you can charge your phone the local cellular infrastructure may be out of service (and if not will probably be oversubscribed). Ditto for cable and DSL. Landline service tends to be much more robust and is often usable for dial-up Internet.
Perversely, as we make ourselves more dependent on electricity we are also making electricity less reliable by refusing to build new power plants and transmission lines.
Some people think they’re more disaster-tolerant with cellphones, unaware that that’s the kind of situation most likely to cause overload and congestion of the system (think Manhattan on 9/11)…
…Or at least those parts still working. It’s still, after all, a radio transceiver that still must connect to the wired system somewhere. And not all cell sites have emergency power, while landlines almost always do.
I continue to contend that people are putting up with shitty tech because they have no experience with good tech.
I doubt that. They put up with shitty tech because it’s more convenient to their lifestyles and what they want than the “good” tech.
It doesn’t really matter if the cell phone drops calls occasionally because there’s always text.
The real problem is both AT&T and T-Mobile are lousy GSM carriers when compared to any of their European cousins – apart from central London at about 3pm on a Friday afternoon when 6 million odd people are working out what pub to go to – I’ve never experienced the dropped calls or poor SMS throughput times that I have on AT&T and T-Mobile.
They might be suffering from their own success in that their network capacity just hasn’t kept up with the explosive increase in penetration they’ve had in the last 5 years, whereas most of the European carriers have had 90%+ penetration to handle since the turn of the century.
On a 3G or 4G network (heck, even EDGE) you could get much better fidelity than you get on cell phones now.
The problem is still load balancing across networks for data packet communication like VOIP on a mobile network. It’s not an ideal set up and things like WiMax or public WiFi were never designed for it. We’re stuck with the more pedestrian versions of 3G and 3.5G for a while yet, but that’ll certainly shift over the next decade.
Here in N. Florida a few years back we had a couple of hurricanes pass by. Cable was out almost immediately, and power out for days, though not as long as cable. But even though a falling tree pulled our landline from the top of the house, it stayed hooked up and we had phone service throughout.
I am currently living in a third world country, and I used to work in the cellular industry. The terrible sound and connection quality in the USA are imposed by regulatory constraints, not by the technology. America does not have a real cellular industry, they have a marketing driving advertising budget! You pay pennies for your cell use, you get no customer service, all you get are cute adds on TV and the radio. So shop around, you AT&T slaves. I pay two cents a minute to call across this large-as-USA country, and ten dollars a month for DSL— but I can not get a landline without a wait of many months. Landline installations require skills like knowing how to read. Cell installations come out of a box.
Be thankful that you can get a POTS in the US! In most of the world the copper would be stolen off the poles. The issues aren’t technological.
I went a year without a landline in rural America and it worked fine, until I put a metal roof up. Walking outside to talk to someone is a pain! Talking to the local phone company, I discovered that I could get a fiber optic line for the same price because I just happened to have a major trunk running through the ranch that I bought. What luck!