Cell phone and land line question

JOCCO

Well-known Member
Do you guys think that land lines will go away as we know them??? Many people have cell phone and cut land line off. Some have magic jack or computer phone. I keep my land line but am wondering if the companies will shut them down eventually. Wonder if business (like tractor dealership) could do with out them. thanks
 
Where I live cell phones do not work so I have to have a land line or I would have nothing as for phone. Plus I need the land line for the computer internet hook up
 
As far as I know, fax machines don't run off of a cell phone.

Although I now scan and email stuff I used to fax.
 
Cell phones do not work where I live, Colorado mountains, so a land line is necessary. Besides this cell phone thing is just a fad.

Tom
 
Younger generation seems to be leading the trend of having only a cell phone. Only one of my three kids has a land line- and everyone seems to be able to function fine without it. They didn't have any particular objection to traditional telephone, but they had smart phones for texting, internet, etc., and just couldn't see paying for duplicative service.
 
I'm about on the end of my rope with conventional phone. I'm getting thoroughly fed up with nuisance calls: scammers, surveys, political propaganda, robo calls, many calls where there's no one there...
And yes, we're on the DO NOT CALL list. They are just ignoring it. If it weren't that friends and customers know our number, and we have been very careful to guard our cell numbers. If it weren't for that, I'd end the land line tomorrow!
 
Land line is main use. Cell just for if on road. And cell nothing but place or recieve call. If did not need cell because of possible car trouble on road would not have it.
 
I think they will fade away to a certain exstent. My land line is owned by a small phone company. They laid fiberoptic to everyone. They offer alot more than just a land line phone. You can get internet service and cable T.V. all through the land line. Some people have disconnected but not to many. I personally have both land line and a cell. Will probly maintain the land line for the other options that come with the phone line. Also, I like to have my name in the phone book so people can get a hold of me if they don't have my cell number. Amazingly, some people call me to get a cell number that they don't have for somebody else that don't have a land line. Yep, they call me cause I am in the phone book and say "do you have a number for so and so".
 
I have wireless home phone,but fiber optic internet that was installed by the phone company,so I have to believe fiber optic has a future at least.
 
Telecommunication companies are eager to dump land lines in rural areas. And in the cities, they're replacing Plain Old Telephone Service with the more profitable broadband. The phone companies got a law passed in the Michigan legislature that makes it much easier to abandon landline service in rural areas.

A couple of months ago our AT&T landline went out completely after several months of static. I called in the problem, but was only able to use their automated system. The system told me it would be two weeks before they could fix the problem! We were getting ready to put a rental house on the market, and we needed that phone working. I started trying to get through to an actual person. It's very easy to contact a live agent for cell phone or internet service, but forget about it if you have a landline problem. In desperation I contacted customer service for AT&T cellular (we have AT&T cell phones). The agent was sympathetic, but she found it as difficult to contact landline customer service as I did. She finally got me through to a woman whose apparent job was to apologize to anyone persistent enough to get through to her, explaining that AT&T doesn't have enough technicians in Michigan. Nice. I went to our local AT&T cell phone store. The salesman there did get ahold of the service people, who called me back to say, "yes, it's going to take two weeks to fix your phone."

Finally, I submitted a complaint to the Michigan Public Service Commission. I put the complaint in on Saturday and the phone was working Tuesday, a week ahead of schedule. I also received a couple of calls from someone who said she was from AT&T's "office of the president" to check on our phone service. I'm not sure what happened, but it seems the MPSC has some folks who take their jobs very seriously. Hats off to them.
 
Two of our 3 kids have cell phone only. I am not comfortable calling them as you never know where they may be, like driving in traffic or someplace where others will be annoyed. So, I don't call them. Simple as that. They call me at home on land line. I have used my cell phone once in last 6 weeks. Costs me 7 bucks a month but if I need it I have one. I do suspect land lines will disappear but not in my lifetime.
 
Yes. Most people don't want two bills. 95% of the population is covered by wireless internet. In a few more years 100% will have access to satellite comms. Plus I envision a host of low altitude (50,000ft) drones providing services.
 
We haven't had a land line in about five years. When I trenched in new water lines I cut the old line in about three places. I guess that seals the deal. I don't miss it a bit. I found that it was just a habit to break.
 
I have both. Land line mostly for the internet.

If you have had any business with a company IIRC they and any affiliate company can call you regardless of the do not call list. Plus a lot of that stuff has moved off shore. The anti telemarketing laws are only applicable in the US. Someone calling from outside the US can just ignore those laws. I really don't think we are going to have much luck prosecuting a company or it's owner/manager in another country. Now I will admit that I hate calls from telemarketers as much as anyone. But those laws shut down a lot of call centers and did away with many fair paying jobs. & or 8 years ago I knew people who worked at one. They started at 9 and hour plus bonuses. Some of those people are working for less than that today.

Rick
 
Legislation is in progress in Michigan to no longer require a hard wired land line. Cost to maintain all that cable, even fiber optic, is rising faster than cost of cell towers. Our State Senator brought out an AT&T rep to test/demonstrate it last year. It was impressive and worked well with our existing in-house system. Probably the way to go in the future in many cases.
 
I think there will always be land connections, they will be fiber optic. Wireless does not have enough bandwidth for a lot of high speed Internet.
 
Where I live in Indiana, Verizon sold off land line to Frontier because Verizon wanted out of the business. Frontier is making a pretty good run of it too, bless their hearts. Verizon like AT&T wants to do wireless only, and the AT&T CEO, Randolph Stevenson says that AT&T will be strictly wireless by 2020.

Sure, there's still plenty of copper out there, but companies like AT&T are making it cost prohibitive to land line customers, intentionally driving the costs up in an attempt to force land line subscribers off of them into wireless, cellular. New construction in a lot of places is wireless to a general area, and then fiber to individual homes, offices from there.

The big business push now, is something called IP Flex, cloud based. Instead of having copper POTS or T1's/PRI's, they are talking companies into subscribing with IP Flex that still uses copper or fiber (if the customer pays MEGA $$$ to install fiber to the street) from the customer premesis back to the Central Office, but from there both voice and data are cloud (internet) based back to who the heck other than Hadji back in India knows? Major problems with that as I've seen them are that at the customer site, this IP Flex service all runs into a router where a small portion of the bandwidth is scraped off for voice via T1/PRI or DS0 POTS, and the rest of it is then used for data to computers for internet access. When a router fails, and they do fail, the customer loses EVERYTHING because ALL of their eggs have been put into one basket. I get a repair and show up to see the customer, and by the time that I get the repair, its now classified as an "emergency" repair, and I ask the customer to tell me what's going on versus what my ticket says, because generally ticket taking clerks are clueless as to what the customer needs, and the first words out of the customer's mouths are, "I've been out of service for a week". Not days, but a week...for voice AND data. In today's dog eat dog world of "global economy" and competition, who can afford to be down, or in essence, shutdown their business for...a week? No one that I know of, beyond the government that has a monopoly anyway. And when I do show up, there is generally a pile of stuff waiting for me to replace, throw at the situation because the frantic customer is at his or her wits end after dealing with Hadji or Benji from India for a week, and Hadji and Benji don't care much about what the customer is going through, nor do they care about physical customer engagement at the customer site since they are sitting in India. They just don't care, and don't need to care, because such customers have at least a two year contract for such bad service, and "Pleased to be telling you to shutup and do as I say, please".

When everything is put out there in "THE CLOUD" (internet), everything is subject to be hacked by hackers that ALSO INCLUDE our government, and foreign governments. Heard just this past week that Chase Bank was hacked by Russia (suspected) as tetaliation for sanctions we put on them for invading the Ukraine. I'm not sure that Russia is interested in Chase or anyone else for that matter, specifically, and maybe they are, but this was about "We can do it, so don't screw with us" back to our white house. China does it, and so do a lot of others. A couple of years ago, Israel hacked Iran's nuke computers and screwed them up badly to shutdown the progress of nuclear missle growth by Iran, and our government then announced to the world that Israel did it with our help, and the very next day Iran was shutting down bank computers here in America as a matter of "We can do it, so don't screw with us" back to our white house. Think of the cloud as one huge computer that is maintained and protected by someone else, and you are being told that YOU need to move all of your stuff, both voice and data over to the cloud. I have a lot of huge customers that have IT (data) staffs and telecommunications departments that tell me flatly in private conversations that "No way are we going to the cloud, because our voice and data ARE proprietary, and we can't afford to have it be hacked by anyone, whether it be our government, foreign governments, or Teddy sitting in his college dorm with nothing else better to do. If AT&T won't continue our service as is, we will take it somewhere else". Knowing the importance of what they are telling me, I won't try to talk them into anything BUT the service that they request. The guy up at the top could care less though, and so it trickles down to his underlings, "Cloud based money for nothing and chicks for free, the customer is going to pay for our MTV".

CAD. Ever hear of it? No, not CAD as in a computer program used by engineers, but rather "Computer Assisted Dispatch". Its used by police and fire departments, fronted ended by 9-1-1 PSAPS (Public Safety Access Points). You dial 9-1-1, or use and old published telephone number for police or fire and talk to a dispatcher, whom is typing what you are telling him, her, them into CAD, and its coming up on a lap top in either a squad car or in the cab of a fire engine, telling the cop or fireman what he or they are up against when they arrive on scene. Very important tool. CAD is maintained locally or regionally by the specific ETSBs that use them, on THEIR servers. Like everything else, there is a push to get ETSBs to get rid of their servers and put CAD into the cloud like everything else, where it is maintained and protected by ???, no one connected with the 9-1-1 call center that one calls when one needs help yesterday, maintained and protected by Benji and Hadji in India. So, I get sent to a presentation from some company regarding IT's CAD product, and his first words were "...cloud based...", his next words were "...the cloud (internet) isn't as unscure as it used to be...". I got up and walked out. Meeting, presentation over less than 5 minutes into it. The cloud isn't as unsecure as it used to be...when dealing with human lives, real time as a home is burning, someone is having a heart attack, someone is being robbed and shot at...and the screen just went blank or that "Annonymous" international hacker's joker face pops up as the lights are flashing and the siren is blaring while a police officer and firemen are racing to get help to someone's. "...the cloud isn't as unsecire as it used to be...". Wanna bet?

Anyway, its the way of the future. Get used to anyone and everyone having access to your voice and data anytime they want it, land and wireless.

And God bless Frontier, I hope they make a real SUCCESSFUL run for it. And if they do, maybe they will force Verizon and AT&T back into honesty once again, unless our government is the big push behind the easliy accessable and hackable cloud, and I don't discard that possibility either. Nothing surprises me anymore.

Mark
 

Lots of people where I am can't get cell service. I can't get much in the house without a booster. Neighboring villages have upgraded people to fiber optic, offering tv, Internet, etc. at not too bad prices. My village is not doing that, they are small and independent. They said they were going to get "some" of us upgraded to fiber optic in 5 years so that we could get Internet from them, up to 4 meg. I get up to 4 meg now from the regional cell carrier, and it's cheaper than the phone company's 4 meg by a lot, and the data cap is high enough that it isn't a concern.

Anyway, it was about $35 for local only service, and the phone line quality was VERY poor. So I got a Straight Talk home phone connect and no longer have call issues. It has a battery backup, and if the booster goes out, gets better reception than a regular cell phone in the house, it works. And if something would happen to a cell tower, the competitor's is right next to it, and used to get service when the cell towers were 30 miles away, so the odds of everything failing in an emergency is pretty slim. Now instead of $35 per month plus long distance charges, I pay $16 with tax for unlimited calling everywhere. My cell phones on Page Plus, 2, add a total of $60 -per year- for more service than I use. And with the wireless setup, I have them all set up to use Google voicemail, the same voicemail. If someone calls the house or any phone, I can either have it automatically forward the calls to a cell phone, or have it leave a message without forwarding. If they leave a message, it can forward a transcribed text and/or email to whatever phone I choose so I can -read- their voicemail. So if there's an emergency or something, someone can call and I'll know right away wherever I am.
 
We gave up our land line for Verizon's Home Connect. Saving just over $20 a month over the AT&T land line. Get more too, like a system voice mail, caller ID, unlimited long distance and unlimited minutes. We have the household portable phones on that, the base is connected to it, and one wired phone (wired to the home network only). It basically powers the home wiring now. No need for a wired phone anymore. Also have two portable cell phones and a tablet on the Verizon too.
 

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