Home Phone Service

[rgf207]

My wife and I are considering dropping our home phone service. We don't really use it. The only people who have it are family members. We really only get calls from family and telemarketers. I don't see why we are paying the 45/month.

What are your thoughts? Has anyone here dropped their home phone and went solely with cell phones?

 

[wvjules]

I haven't had home phone in about a year. I don't really miss it but there have been times when DD's phone was confiscated/missing/not working and she was unable to call me when she got home from school. I'm considering getting the cheapest plan available soon.

However, if it weren't for DD I wouldn't want to get a landline again.

 

[Disney Doll]

Lots of people in my area have done that. I, unfortunately, cannot since we have lousy cell service at our house. We live in a dip in the road with a cemetery across the street and no cell tower close by.

 

[laurie31]

We also have lousy cell service inside our house, so it wouldn't work for us, and we also have VERY serious concerns with being able to call 911 from a cell and have them trace the call properly if we weren't able to give our address. I understand these things are being worked on, and some areas are safer than others.

We have pared our landline down to NO extras, not even long distance service (we use our cell for that) so it's only $35/month. Plus a landline means unlimited minutes for our DDs to talk on the phone to their friends. If we had only cells, we'd have to REALLY curtail their conversations.

 

[HsvTeacher]

We dropped our land line a couple of years ago, and we've never missed it. My DH and I both have cell phones, and everyone we know uses them to call us. Plus, we are saving over $500 a year!

 

[daughtersrus]

If it was just the phone, I'd think about it ( we have free incoming calls on our cells so that wouldn't be a problem) but we have DSL. If we dropped the phone we'd also have to change from DSL. We'd be paying more for internet with Comcast as we are currently paying for DSL and the phone.

 

[wvjules]

If it was just the phone, I'd think about it ( we have free incoming calls on our cells so that wouldn't be a problem) but we have DSL. If we dropped the phone we'd also have to change from DSL. We'd be paying more for internet with Comcast as we are currently paying for DSL and the phone.

I just dropped Comcast for Verizon DSL and didn't need a home phone.

 

[LuvOrlando]

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[OrlandoMike]

and we also have VERY serious concerns with being able to call 911 from a cell and have them trace the call properly if we weren't able to give our address.

Just an FYI. If you drop your service, they have to leave your land line hooked up for 911 service. That will be the only call you will be able to make. But its nice to know its there!

 

[daughtersrus]

I just dropped Comcast for Verizon DSL and didn't need a home phone.

Thanks for the info. Verizon isn't an option for us. We have AT&T and you have to have a land line for the DSL. We're also charged extra on our Dish Network if the box isn't connected to a phone line for updates and pay per view.

 

[bicker]

We were going to consider it, except that that would break our home remote-monitored alarm system.

We've also noted that a lot of the alternative phone services explicitly disclaim responsibility for compatibility with alarm systems. That's pretty disappointing.

 

[MoniqueU]

I did this and then my mom who lives with me threw a hissy fit and called them up and wanted it switched to her name. I gave up and just said fine I will pay for it. My kids also didnt like the idea even though they all have their own cells. I still use it quite a bit as I have unlimeted long distance and don't always have my cell sitting right next to me. There are 6 of us on our cell phone service with 3000 minutes but my DH and oldest DD suck most of those away. So for us it didn't work. We also had alot of rewards programs tied to our home phone number and my mom couldnt remember all the rewards programs we had so she wanted to keep our number. I wonder though if I could switch to vonage and keep my number?

So I think for alot of people jjust having a cell works for them but it didn't work for us.

 

[HsvTeacher]

Thanks for the info. Verizon isn't an option for us. We have AT&T and you have to have a land line for the DSL. We're also charged extra on our Dish Network if the box isn't connected to a phone line for updates and pay per view.

We have AT&T DSL, and we don't have a home phone. The wireless modem is plugged into the phone jack. We also have DISH Network and have never had to pay a connection fee. (Even though a message always pops up on the TV.) One of the tech people told us to occasionally plug it into the wireless modem for updates.

 

[Colleen27]

We haven't had home phone service in over a year and don't miss it at all. We have 3 cells - mine, DH's and DS's - so a landline was really an unnecessary expense.

 

[ZachnElli]

We just dropped ours. It was also $45 a month. But we did pick up for $5 a month unlimited receiving calls. This means we still have a phone number and anyone can call us, we have an answering machine (the old fashion kind) so we can get messages too. It also means we still can dial 911, but we can't dial anything else out.

 

[TimothyQMouse]

A few years ago, we switched to Vonage. It is a phone service that runs over your internet connection. It waas only $15/month and worked great for a year. Then our Vonage box broke and they sent us a new one. During the week we didn't have it, we concluded that we didn't need it and dropped it.

We never could get our DirecTV to connect over Vonage. Now, it doesn't care. It connects over the Internet.

We replaced our alarm system with one that used the cell network.

We added a portable phone setup that uses Bluetooth. When I walk in the house, our cell phones sync with the portable phone base station. Using that, we can make calls from any of the portable phones around the house and they use the cell phones to make their connections.

 

[ZachnElli]

A few years ago, we switched to Vonage. It is a phone service that runs over your internet connection. It waas only $15/month and worked great for a year. Then our Vonage box broke and they sent us a new one. During the week we didn't have it, we concluded that we didn't need it and dropped it.

We never could get our DirecTV to connect over Vonage. Now, it doesn't care. It connects over the Internet.

We replaced our alarm system with one that used the cell network.

We added a portable phone setup that uses Bluetooth. When I walk in the house, our cell phones sync with the portable phone base station. Using that, we can make calls from any of the portable phones around the house and they use the cell phones to make their connections.

I want to know more about that! I had someone telling me that they hooked their's up so that it would call their cell phone, is that the same as what you are talking about?

 

[mill4023]

We dropped landline service 7 years ago.
When we moved to Charlotte, we signed up for the package with TWC that included tv, internet, and digital phone. But we almost never used it, so when we decided to cancel TWC tv and switch to DirecTV, we just dropped the phone service as well.

I thought it might be a problem, but we didn't need any phone connection for our DirecTV service. If we ever want to do pay per view, we can order shows online.

 

[horseshowmom]

We did this a few months ago, and to be honest, it hasn't worked out as well as we had hoped. If you don't remember to take your phone with you to the bedroom every single night you could miss an important call. My daughter called in the middle of the night from her apartment because she was extremely sick. In fact, she called 3 times. I never heard the phone because I had left it in the living room (as had DH).

Now this is the first time she's ever called like this, but we've had a couple of other times that people have called and the phone didn't ring for some reason.

DH's mother is older, and we don't really want to take a chance now that we've tried it. I think we're going to reconsider and put the phone back in.