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17 August 2010
*sigh* I am going wireless. Goodbye land line. More sadly, goodbye to my beloved rotary phone.
I have one because it came as a package with the internet access and cable TV but I refuse to acknowledge it. I don't know the number and never answer it.
...cue the incredulous people who haven't had a land-line for years (me included -- about 8 years now and it's never been an issue. what would be the issue?).
I think the one and only reason why I still have a land line is for my kids -- if they ever have to call 911. Or, in general if anybody calls, they will know our address immediately. I'm bad about putting my cell phone in the same time each place. It unlikely, but it wouldn't be good if my one of my kids had to call 911 if I were burning in a kitchen fire or something and couldn't locate a phone. ;-)
The issue is that I will miss the sensation of DIALING a phone, which I have enjoyed my whole life, and also the much more comfortable handset of an old fashioned phone. Compared to the phone pictured above, aesthetically speaking a cell phone is just a nasty little black thing. Unfortunately it is also much much cheaper.
So true about an actual phone with weight to it. JanetLand. I love the heavy feel of my replica phone. I only have one cordless in my house. The other two are old fashioned.
I still have a rotary and treasure its real ringy-bell ring. I don't have a landline to make it ring right now, though. BUt I wouldn't mind getting one back. Talking on a cell phone is a crap experience. Every time I talk on a land line, it's like velvet.
Haven't had a landline since college. Never needed one. Gotten to the point where people who don't have cellphones and *only* have landlines baffle me.
The whole old-fashioned awesome looking rotary phones thing is what I miss about having a landline. I've begun selling mine (the plexi-glass and leather gem went a couple of weekends ago, no more pretending to be a Bond-villain answering taht phone which had the angriest ring in the universe).
I haven't had a landline for 4 years. I still have eight landline phones.
Oh, I see that. My phone lives in the same place as soon as I walk into the apartment, (which is annoying, because the kid now knows where to find it to play). Certainly, talking on a land-line is nicer, but I hate talking on the phone anyway, so an enhancement of an experience that I don't enjoy isn't really that much of a plus to me.
I don't think i have good coverage for a mobile phone at my house. I did have a cell phone for a year back in the 90s but i didn't use it enough to justify the expense. Every cordless phone I ever used sounded like crap and I hate them. So it is a wired landline phone for me. I am not keeping up with new stuff. That's what happens when you get old, I guess.
I guess it does depend a lot on the area - thinking about it, my parents up in Vermont have very iffy service. I'd definitely hold on to a landline in that situation. But living in an urban area... there's really no point. Sure, you can get it bundled in with TV and internet, but we don't have TV either, so just buying internet is way cheaper.
I went the other way: got rid of my cell phone and am considering a nicer Actual Telephone for our landline. Some time ago, something changed --- towers? building patterns? wizard's curse? --- and my cell stopped getting reliable reception at home, severely limiting its usefulness. After a coupla years of increasing frustration, I realized how little I liked carrying around a phone, how much more it cost me than a landline, and how rarely I used it outside the house.
Lately, I am kinda hungering for an iPhone, though. A cell phone is just a phone in my pocket; I want the new fancyphone that does magic*.
* or things that my tiny brain finds indistinguishable from magic.
I'm one of those luddites who still has a land line, though I do have a cell phone as well. I still find the quality of cell phone audio dreadful, and like that if I dial 911 I will get through to the right call center, and they will know where I am right away. Also, during the huge August 2003 blackout, my land line worked just fine throughout, whereas cell service gradually disappeared and was gone entirely by the 8 hour mark.
I seldom actually use my cell phone to make phone calls. Maybe twice a week or so at the most. So far this month, starting seven days ago, I have 13 minutes of talk time logged. 99% of its use is Internet stuff: browsing, email, Google Talk, Facebook, etc.
I have a land line with DSL on it. Never got a cell phone. Didn't own a computer for years. But I can't say I'm a luddite since I had a vt100 terminal to connect to the internet in the 80s.
I only keep my landline because I've had to the number for so long I can rattle it off when asked, without thinking. I still have to think about what my cell number is, even after 5 years of it.
And the thing is, I really like having two separate numbers. I don't want to port the landline number to my cell service, because then all those annoying calls - "vote for me," "jehovah's witnesses" etc. - would have to come to my cell phone, wherever I am. No thank you.
I keep hoping Google Voice will somehow gain the ability to port existing landline phone numbers into it.
My dad has lived in the same house since 1963 and all of his phones are rotary. One is mounted smack dab in the middle of the dining room wall and has such a short handset cord so you have to stand there while talking. Even though I grew up with these phones (by 'these phones' I mean these exact phones, the beige wallmounted one and the pink princess phone in the master bedroom), I can barely use them now because my fingers have memorized phone numbers by their position on a keypad, not by number.
I still have a landline at home because during the last big quake, cell service was down or overloaded for days, cable was out for nearly two weeks but the landline never stopped working.
We still have a land line. It's the 911 issue and paranoia: what if there's a problem with the cellular system and you can't use your cell phone. We use cordless phones and also have a regular "plug into the wall phone" in case the power goes out and we need to call emergency services. At times the mister's paranoia can be a little out of whack, but in this case I agree with him.
Our landline runs through the cable modem so it won't work in the case of a power outage anyway. And chances are, it's way more likely that the cell system be working and my house's power not than the other way around.
I could be wrong, but I was always under the impression that a traditional phone plugged into a wall jack can call 911 even if there's not an active line. Was I mistaken?
(Just curious. I don't really have an opinion on the landline debate).
put me down as one of the people without a landline and with no desire for one. I haven't had a land line since *thinks a bit* um... 1999, actually.
I associate rotary dial phones with the spotty service of my youth(our underground lines were frequently prone to crapping out from wet and digging animals in rural areas) the party lines and associated annoying drama (having to make an emergency call to the vet / my mom / etc... whilst one of the neighbour lady's 8 kids up the street was hogging the line YET AGAIN).
so there is that. Also, my mobile is always, always, always in the same place: the shoulder holster on my messenger bag :P
I had nothing but pure annoyance on Friday night for my luddite friend who WILL. NOT. get a goddamn cellphone, hence we couldn't get in touch with her to let her know we'd be arriving ~20 minutes late at our meetup spot, owing to me having crashed my bike and needing to ride home and get another functional one. It's also a severe pain in the ass to arrange impromptu mountain bike rides with her, so she gets left out of these sorts of things much more frequently than we'd prefer.
I still have a landline, but I never use it. If people ask me for my home number, I say I don't have one. Because of this, I don't answer it when it rings, because it's clearly not for me. My SO is not prepared to give it up, because she likes to talk on the phone for ages to her friends. What doesn't help is that we have very spotty reception at home from any mobile phone provider, so it can be hard to reach us on those numbers when we're at home. The thing is, I consider that a feature, not a bug ;-)
I just switched to cell phone only, when we moved a month or so ago. We had Vonage at the old apartment, but I realized I rarely used it because the quality was so bad (not sure if that was due to the connection or the actual phone).
I hate my current cell phone, I get very little reception in our new house, and I still find I don't miss the land line. Which is odd, because I thought I was the only holdout left; I feel weird not having a house phone, but that's because of my weirdness about feeling like I should have one, not because of any way in which I'd actually use one.
I do feel like it splits up ikkyu2's and my friends and family. There's never that incidental contact we'd have with each other's people if they called a combined number. I do think that's a big downside, because we're both introverted enough that we'd never really call each other's family just to chat.
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