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Could Cell Phones Replace Regular Phones?
Although something like this could happen, I think there are several reasons why we aren't-quite-ready-for-it-yet. Cellular coverage is spotty at best across the U.S. and I'm not quite sure how widespread coverage is in Europe (but the information would be appreciated). I mean, I have a new cell phone (a Nokia 6185) and there were times I couldn't make a call from the center of downtown Manhattan which mystified the hell out of me at the time (turns out my phone was somehow kicked out of the system).
Of course, when it comes to signal quality, I think that there are some cellular phones that sound better than your average land-line, but the place where your land-line will win hands down over any of the new wireless upstarts is reliability. On a landline phone, you pick the receiver up off the cradle and you get a dialtone (assuming you've paid the bill, of course). I'm sure many of you will agree that cellular isn't quite at that level yet, although it's getting there. I figure everything will change within a year or two that will make even today's best predictions meaningless.
So how long do you think it will take (if ever) before everyone has a cell phone and land lines become a thing of the past?
The Jury is still out with that brain cancer stuff. We'll all know in about 10-15 years exactly whats going on. Either its no big deal or a super-duper tragedy just incubating.
On the other hand in industrialized countries the reasons for switching entirely to mobile phones are different but mostly also cost related. Countries where the mobile coverage reaches an acceptable range, and I personally can only talk about Finland where ist is darn close to 100%, there is really no drawback to having a cell phone regardless of where you live (plus the obvious advantages of the cell phones mobility).
Here in Finland the amount of housholds with only a cell phone and no hard line is rising steadily as well as in other European countries. The main reason being cheap phone calls. Whith the infrastructure of the mobile network in place, operators can start lowering the call prices as the investments that were needed to build the network are being paid back and the interest on them get less and less. The price difference in the monthly fee of a hard line and a mobile is enough to let you talk for about one hour on your mobile, admittedly not much, but with additional plans for eg. interoperator calls that can go up to three hours and then your only at the amount you'd have to pay for having the hard line to your home. I reacon the States still have some way to go before a significant price drop in the call charges happens since your operators are still building the network and that takes a lot of money.
One other big question which comes up in deciding whether to get rid of the hard line is the computer. Connecting to the net over a cell phone is... well it sucks. Here again students have the advantage since universities offer unlimited net access in some cases even in the campus living quarters. Other non-phoneline related solutions like cable modems are slowly making progress and in turn accelerate the rate at which people give up their hard lines (with a cable modem and a mobile phone you really don't need a hard line anymore).
I moved to the Netherlands from the US 6 months ago and the amount of people with mobile phones just amazed me.
The prices are alright ( go here for details Dutch GSM pricing summary. It's a summary of all mobile plans offered in the Netherlands. It's in Dutch but you'll figure it out. 1f is about $.40 )
I think the reason is HOW they price. With all phones, land and cell, owners only pay for out-going calls. So, if you have a cell phone you can leave it on all the time and not worry about someone calling you and talking your ear off.
Mobiles here have their own area codes that way people calling you know that it's going to be more expensive
Currently, the only minus I see with only having a cell phone is that calling international is pretty expensive where-as it's pretty cheap with land-phones. Oh, and cell modem speeds are pretty slow.
As far as coverage, it's great and it doesn't seem to be affected going into Germany and Belgium.
(On a side note, I have yet to see ONE pager here.)
-ta dah-
i stay in south africa and altough costly i only as do most pepole i know use a cell this makes it cheaper for me as cell-cell calls are cheaper than terestrial-cell calls the comedy is cell phones are more reliable than land lines.
for internet i have a leased analougue line that works out cheaper than dialup.
its a win win situation.
bandwidth is hellish expensive 15000R per 64kb/s
so high speed lines are out the question.
Monthly: $2.92 - $4.62 (no data conection) $4.62 - $18 (data connection) Calls: $0.09 - $0.15 (to same operator) $0.09 - $0.37 (to hard line) $0.15 - $0.37 (to other operator)
These are the prices for the oprator that I use, Radiolinja, the prices of other operators are pretty much the same since there is fierce competition over customers here in Finland where the law prohibits long term binding contracts to operators and thus switching between them is easy.
The price ranges indicated give the prices depending on time of day and type of contract. not listed are special contracts like "family line" where the call costs between three individual phones and a hard line can be as low as $0.04 per minute.
For reference, a hard line costs about $10 a month with calls at $0.07 per ten minutes. So lets hear what ather countries have to offer.
I noticed last summer, that with a GSM to handle my calls and a cable modem for network access, my regular phone was mostly unused. Come to think of it, most of my friends don't have regular telephones anymore.
Atleast over here in Finland, the mobile markets are very competitive which brings down the prices. Regular telephone calls are cheaper, but the fixed monthly fee is considerably higher.
- mipe -
The only down side I can see is perhaps is data communications. I'm not sure about most places but all the cable companies that I know ask that you pay for cable TV for cablemodem services.
If you use DSL or some other Telco inet access, they might toss in the same idea that you need some basic phone service.
I'm curious how this will work given the lack of consistency with in building coverage and other interference that mobiles can suffer.
In some areas when installing a 'fixed phone' we actually install a phone that uses the mobile network. IIRC there is at least one island whose entire phone network is provided using mobile technology.
With Short Messaging Service (SMS) standard in GSM phones, you can send up to about 180 characters to a mobile phone.
The practical upshot is that nobody cares about pages anymore.
-John
Less than a year ago I moved into a new apartment and realized hooking up phone service was pretty much ridiculous. With my cell service I get 600 minutes free a month, with free long distance and all for about the price of a conventional phone. I'm not much for chatting on the phone, so why bother? I have an answering service, a paging service and availability in a majority of the areas I "WANT" to be contacted in. In the end I finally got a phone line, but I went straight to ISDN, and its always dialed out for Internet. Thats the number I give to telemarketers...(Good luck getting me on that line...)
I don't see how conventional phone companies are going to keep up unless they push DSL and such technologies a lot harder and a lot faster...
For cell phones to be accepted in the USA, the billing system will have to revamped much like it is in Finland and other countries.
In underdeveloped countries, it may be much easier to run signal repeaters rather than traditional phone lines (probably easier maintenance, too).
I once mentioned to my wife that we really don't need a phone anymore since our internet service is through a cable modem and we can use our cell phone just as easily (we have voicemail). She looked at me as if I had grown a third eye. Apparently, the idea was very unconventional to her, leading me to believe that social culture will have to get used to the idea that stationary phones will become dinosaurs.
I can't count the number of times (lately) I've wanted someone to call me, but I've had to be home for the call.
Most people (in the USA) have the idea that a cell phone is an infrequently used, emergency call device. It can be so much more.
It seems to me that the key for this to happen is how good service is at your house. You are only trying to replace one phone and so you only care about service at that location for comparison. Personally I have great service at my home (Sprint PCS) and have switched most people to use my cellular. I have a cable modem for Internet access. The only thing I use my regular phone for is telemarketers. I bought a phone with Caller ID in the handset and I just never, ever answer the darn thing unless I know who it is. I never give my cellular number to companies so it doesn't appear in those nasty phone spam databases. I guess you could call my old land line a phone spam trap :)
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Speaking for the areas that I know best, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, England, Ireland and parts of eastern Europe, coverage is close to 100%. Other GSM areas cover all the major population centres and main roads, but with less coverage of rural areas. Many areas with no land line coverage often have a GSM signal, since a cell site will cover up to 5000 square Kms over a big flat rural area.
:-)
The only parts of Belgium where coverage is spotty is the hilly south east corner, where the signals don't get down into the tiny valleys, and downtown Brusssels when the cell sites get overwhelmed by the huge number of users. France has close to 90% coverage, with only some mountainous regions missing. Even travelling around Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia and a few other former east bloc countries has an amazing level of coverage.
I've got an american dual-band digital and analog phone for when I have to work in America. I'm constantly surprised how little coverage there is, especially when taking a road trip on the main highways. Even around DC, where I would expect a heavy investment by the local companies to provide 100% coverage, there was no signal in many places.
But getting back on topic, YES, cell phones will eventually replace much of the land line installations, but not all. Businesses will never go wireless, it doesn't make sense except for maybe the sales force. Many citizens will stick to their landlines for now, they just don't lead the kind of lives where a portable makes sense. But younger people crave the independance of a cell phone, and if you read the euro-centric newsgroups you will find a lot of support for those who want to go completely wireless in their lives.
I lived for years without a land line, but it was very tricky to get GSM service without a land line to tie it to. In France, it is close to impossible to get a cell phone without proving 'domicile fixe' with a current phone bill in your name. But friends have done it, first getting the cell phone, then cancelling their land line. Normally FT and Belgacom will not let you cancel your service until you provide them with a new address, so the best plan is to tell them you are moving to another country for a while for work or school. You might even get your deposit back
With any luck, when demand for hard lines starts to decrease, the phone companies will cut the prices way back, making POTS available for more poor people who can't afford it right now.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
No landline phone, PROS:
You're not in the phone book. No telemarketers. This is a huge benefit.
You have only one voicemail number to check.
There are months when it's actually cheaper, depending on your lifestyle.
No landline phone, CONS:
Cellphones, quite honestly, suck. I often drop connections. This is improving fast, though, even in michigan.
You're not in the phone book. No friends.
You're gonna have to figure out another method for internet.
Filling out forms for the doctor/employer/IRS is a little bit complicated when you only have one phone number.
It freaks Grandma out.
Guests have trouble figuring out how to make a call on your cellphone. (okay, that could be good)
One of my housemates uses her cell phone for all her calls (we're going to be using her landline for DSL), and my parents have disconnected long distance over the regular line because the cell phone is cheaper (mostly because 300 minutes/month free, anywhere in the US). Though amusingly, after my Dad cancelled long distance, we started getting $5/month charges for not having long distance. So he signed up for it again and then didn't pay the bill, at which point they cancelled our long distance service (without the monthly fee). Phone companies suck. :)
The person I rent a room from has a land line phone, but I don't use it. I don't know where I'll be living in two months. I see no reason to assume I'll live at the same address for 6 consecutive months again in my life. (Though odds are I will live in one place for a long time) My phone number hasn't changed in years, and I don't expect it to change often.
Land lines are for data. If you want to contact me, I have one phone, and one number - my cell phone.
I've only encountered two areas where I don't have service, and since I was on vacation both times I didn't feel bad. Besides it was just a matter of getting out of the tent and walking up the cliff (a couple hundred feet of steep hillside really) to get service. Not a big deal.
Mobile 'phones have already entirely replaced land lines for a few people I know, and have become the primary contact for many others. Around 40% of the UK population own a mobile phone, I believe Finland leads the world with over 70% usage. Extremely competative markets have put pricing within reasonable reach for many unemployed and students, even school kids. Mobile 'phones are sold in pre-packaged boxes in supermarkets.
Part of this is because most European telcos stopped charging the mobile 'phone owners for receiving calls quite some time ago. I understand that this still isn't always the case in the US?
In the UK, the coverage is very good in reasonably densely populated areas, and weak only in the very least densly populated areas of the country.
With upcoming technologies like GPRS and UMTS, mobile data will become a sensible proposition. Given that the mobile phone operators need to make 370UKP (about $590) profit from every man, woman, and child in the UK to just cover the costs of the recent radio-spectrum auction, you can bet that the companies will be heavily pushing products suitable for everyone, from accessing AOL and shopping channels to real-time video conferencing. You can also bet that the 'web pads' and the like, will be using CPUs from Transmeta and ARM, and hopefully those that aren't running EPOC will be running a free O/S.
I'm sticking to my stationary phone, I hate mobiles. I don't want to be reachable everywhere, and when people visit me, the mobile phone should be turned off. I already have a phone, and 2 phones in the house is overdoing it. But, here in the netherlands, with coverage of about 95% (give or take 5%) mobile phones are a reasonable alternative to stationary ones. if you don't mind the terrible soundquality of most phones. Now if only people would turn off their phones.. I really hate people (who always start talking VERY VERY LOUDLY) getting phonecalls in cinemas, bars, coffee-shops etc.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
When I moved last October. I needed a phone. I looked at the cost of installing a hard line where I was staying and the cost of a cell phone. I compared what I needed in a phone and how I used it. Installing a hard line would have been $129 and getting a cell phone was only $119. After I added all the features that I would need to the hard line my bill would have been $65 a month. With my cell phone I got all the features I wanted plus the flexablity of a cell phone for $67 a month.
For that 67 clams I got Caller ID, Voice Mail, Call Forwarding, Detailed Billing, and Call Waiting. I have 450 minutes of "primetime" use and unlimited nights and weekend use. During the day it is a business phone and at night is a personal phone. Thank you BellSouth!
As for coverage. I'm covered 99% of the places that I go and I live in Alabama to boot.
I moved out a few months latter and I still don't have a hard line. As far as I'm concerned I never will.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
One of the biggest problems with current cellular technology is that the phones cannot be localized. If you call 911 from a land-based line, the operator knows immediately where you are calling from. There are a few solutions to this problem by using GPS receivers on the phones. However, I don't think any cellular network has implemented this technology yet.
I would like to be able to walk in a store and pay cash for a phone, and pre-pay for a certain number of minutes in cash, and then walk out having never revealed my name or other personal information. Of course, I should also be able to return with the phone and more cash and add more minutes.
Does anyone know of where I can get such a deal ?
In what countries is this common ?
I spent a week in the UK recently, most of the time in northern Scotland, and I was amazed at how much better their system was than what we have in the States. All of the phones have really cool musical rings, Just about EVERYONE has one, and the coverage was amazing, even out in the middle of Nowhere in the Highlands of Scotland. I asked our bus driver about it, and he was surprised our coverage was so much worse!
The one thing that will keep me a landline customer for a long time to come is the fact that a simple conventional telephone is powered by the telco, not the electric company. For all we hate about The Phone Company, they're *extremely* reliable. They've done high availability longer than anyone.
We generally get at least one >24-hour power outage a year, but the phones never go down. After the batteries run out, if I can't power my cellphone some other way, it's useless.
[Still looking forward to the next huge advance in battery technology, and the day we kiss the power grid goodbye!]
A few years ago AT&T started a program called "project angel" which was intended to replace POTS lines with a cellular system in the home. Check out this story at Cnet.com.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
Many people on this thread have noted how much better coverage is in Europe than in the US, though not much is said of why this might be. It's certainly partly a result of different goals and cost systems, but I think the biggest difference is one of population density. I am an American, though I'ved lived in Germany for about 7 years. When I first came to Europe I looked up the statistics for several different European countries. If memory serves, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands each have population densities about 10 TIMES that of the US. This means for every square mile (or square kilometer), there are 10 times as many Europeans in those countries than in the US. For instance, Germany is only a little bigger than North and South Carolina put together in the US, but has some 90 million people. All of the US put together has about 270 million (if memory serves). France and Spain have somewhat lower densities but I believe they are still higher than the US. Probably most of Scandinavia is lower. What does this mean? It means it is relatively cheaper per-person (by as much as 10:1) to string up a cellular network with 100% coverage in Europe. It will take much longer and probably cost a lot more to do so in the US and the rest of North America. It would be interesting to correlate population density with cellular coverage.
I dropped my landline in '98, and have been straight PCS ever since. The biggest problems:
* Not dependable. Mobile phone companies believe it far more acceptable to have a tower down than landline companies do to have your line dead. Neither really give a shit, but my company cares a bit less.
* No phone book listing. I'd like to be in the phone book, but it just won't happen. I tried to pay them, but they still wouldn't do it. Small problem, but it does suck.
* Extensions. I'd like to have multiple phones on the same line. One in the kitchen, one in my bedroom. When the phone rings, then I wouldn't have to race across the apartment to wherever I left my phone.
* Modem. I've got a DSL, so I don't really care, but it would be nice to have the option of having a modem when my DSL dies. (Again, courtesy of Intelos.)
* Long distance. I pay $0.15 / minute, and I can't switch. I've never heard of a mobile phone provider that would let people switch their long distance. I can't call overseas. Intelos tries to tell me that it's technically impossible, which is a load, clearly. Once that line hits the CO, it doesn't matter what kind of a phone that I'm on. Again, I'm yet to find a mobile phone provider that would let me make overseas calls.
I won't go back to a landline. But I've been tempted, a few times, to suppliment my mobile with a landline.
-Waldo
When Sprint PCS service became available, I bought a phone fro my wife and myself, and dropped Ameritech (hopefully never to return).
I am figuring a $25-40 savings per month over traditional land-line phones. Before I used an ISDN line so we each had a number, but now we each have a phone, voicemail, callerID, etc. Long Distance is included and we have 1000 minutes to blow this month.
I know of a ouple otherr people who ditched their land line phones, I believe it will become increasingly popular, as high-speed internet access (cable, and DSL) become more popular.
What would be really cool is a cradle for the cell phone, that plugs into your homesexisting wiring, and when the phone is "docked" allows you to place and recive calls like a regular land-line. I imagine some kind of mini-pbx would actually provide the dial tone, and the interface between cell-phone and teh handsets in your house. That would be quite cool, has anyone heard of anything like that?
-MS2k
I'd love to drop my land line and get a cell phone but I'd have to get two, one for me and one for my wife. Is anyone in this same situation? Do you have two cell phones and no landline? Is it financially viable?
There are earphones that plug into the cell phone and come with a microphone that clips onto the lapel. This way you're far enough from the cell phone to avoid the brain cancer risk.
I personally believe that wireless is not only feasible, it's being delayed. I'm not sure why, or by whom, but the technology is there. Financially, everyone with the capitol is doing too well to be really pressured to alter things, but it seems to me that wires should be for power, period.
As far as cell modems being slow, there is a truth to that, but wireless ethernet isn't, and I don't really see any reason why it should be building by building; Lucent manufactures mile radius plus antennae for the stuff; I think there's a market for an ISP that sets up wireless ether and rents/sells WiFi cards to those without. I think there's a market for a WLL base that could be a one time purchase and would talk to your cell phone and put it on your local line. Combine that with a single-number service and you're in business.
I really do think that there's a whole realm of possibilities that a little real innovation and invention in the wireless device field might open up.
For instance, what about a device that set cell phones within it's range to vibrate or 'take a message' mode if available. Great for meeting rooms, and better for movie theatres. Granted, we aren't there yet, and the current billing schemes are insane (for instance, at the moment, I'll bet the service providers would charge you to have your phone silenced in the movies as well as charging the theatre), and there's room for abuse (some sort of authorization or some such to prevent people from buying a kill-box and shutting peoples phones down.) but consider the benifits of a technical society freed of wires and matured beyond the expectation that that means instant access to everyone.
Rambling summary: I certainly hope wireless can beat out wired. And I think it can.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
You get yelled at, or questioned, as to why you didn't answer your mobile phone. At least if you don't have one, you don't have to explain.
Personally, I think of cell phones and beepers as leashes - plain and simple. However, I don't think of myself as a slave...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I have recently been faced with this problem too. I am moving out into an apartment with a high speed data connection. The phone company requires a standard phone line for DSL service. So I said certainly, I will take a regular phone line so I may have some high speed access. I also have one of the SPRINT PCS phones, with no roaming, and no long distance. So pretty much the home phone is the telemarketers phone line.
-Tim
We live at the northern tip of Bell Atlantic's NJ local landline service area. According to Bell Atlantic we live in a completely different county to the people on the other side of town - calling my stepdaughter's grandmother, who lives 5 minutes walk away but who has Sprint as the local carrier, is a local-toll call.
Because we're so remote from the rest of Bell Atlantic's operations (38000 feet from the switch according to dslreports.com) our quality of service sucks. It took three months to get both of our lines working successfully - they eventually fixed it when I started talking to their repair people about getting a third line installed (which would have had to have been new copper) and cancelling one of the other two. Calls to their service department were a joke, as I started treating their estimated date for someone to come out as an opening gambit in a negotiating session, rather than a hard position ("Someone will be out on Friday morning", "Come on, that's 3 days away - I know you can do better than that. How about late afternoon tomorrow instead", "I'll take a look and see if there'll be anyone nearby then").
After all this, we can't get more than a 26Kbps connection to the web, and our voice line is useless in a rainstorm. We can't get DSL (too far away from the switch), towns 10 miles away from us don't even have cable TV service, so we've little hope of cable modems, and we live in NJ's Ski area (I bet lots of you didn't know NJ even had skiing!) so wireless reception is spotty to say the least.
Considering I'm still hoping to get one form of phone service that works consistently, and I live less than 50 miles from the biggest city in the US, I think that it's still a bit of a stretch to imagine a near-term situation where lots of people in the US are completely wireless.
I'm using my cell phone as my only phone right now. But it's pretty darn expensive. In my area (Cleveland), both SprintPCS and AT&T signals are just too weak for some of the buildings I'm in alot (including my brick apartment building). I'm well within the digital service area of both companies, but it's just too weak. I personally don't think SprintPCS and AT&T have been keeping up with the demand, and have seen many of my friends switch to more expensive servive from other companies after they grew tried of hearing the phone beep everytime they went into a little hole in the coverage. While $59.99 for 500 min (or whatever it is these days) with no long distance sounds great, one has to consider the level of service you'll get. I eventually went with Airtouch(now Verizon, used to be CellularOne) because no matter where I went, i always had a good signal.
That cell phone converage is spotty in the US really dose suprise me. Here in the UK, on the Orange network (99% coverage). When outdoors i have only ever lost two calls. Both times in a very low area (altitudem, that is) (Orange have a very high frequency slot, well above that of the other mobile people: vodafone, one2one, bt cellnet). Unless it a thick walled building, or im at the center of it, I also find similar excelent coverage indoors as well.
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cr0sh: You get yelled at, or questioned, as to why you didn't answer your mobile phone. At least if you don't have one, you don't have to explain.
You don't have to be a slave to your phone; and it's nobody's business whether you answer your mobile phone or not.
My phone -- any phone, land or mobile -- is there for my convenience, not the caller's. If I feel like answering the phone, I will. If not, that's what voice mail is for. But I do not and will not drop everything simply because the phone demands it.
I haven't hung up my internet connection in over 3 weeks, and that was only because of a storm that took out the landline. Neither dsl or cablemodem has reached my area yet, and the line quality is so bad I'm pretty much locked at 2.8k a sec. I use my cellphone for everything voice. My nextel plan is wildly expensive(~100US a month), but I don't pay extra for incoming calls, long distance calls, roaming. I have voicemail, caller id, call forwarding, 3 way call, etc all included. Plus Direct Connect(a 2 way radio feature between me and other users. It bounces off the cell towers, so the range is . I actually use that more than I use the actual phone part, as its not included in my monthly 600 minutes, and it tends to circumvent the "hi, how ya doin. blah blah blah." effect when all I want to do is ask a quick question.
To the people who are saying "cellphone network coverage has to be near 100% before..." or something like that, does your landline cover the whole US? If the cellphone covers your house and the surrounding area greater than the radius of a 2.4 ghz cordless, it's more convient. Plus, if you get a small phone, and a comfortable clip, you never have to run to get a phone call.
metatopic: if you're considering a cellphone, the speakerphone on the motorola i1000 plus is incredible. Nobody every knows your on a speakerphone.
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"What is that sound its making?"
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"What is that sound its making?"
"It thinks it has a virus, but its actually just linux."
Nextel allows for international calls. You have to tell them you want it available when you sign up(I assume you can have it later activated.) It doesn't cost anything to have it enabled, but I don't know what they charge for the call. Nextel is more geared to buissness than personal(read, more expensive, w/ features for a workforce, such as direct connect and international calling). It really is worth it if you can get a few friends to sign up too(for the direct connect.)
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"What is that sound its making?"
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"What is that sound its making?"
"It thinks it has a virus, but its actually just linux."
In a way Europe has been leapfrogging, like Third World countries. Europe has phones, of course, but they weren't as pervasive or cheap or reliable as US ones. So cells look more attractive. And are easier to implement since Europe is denser, as people have mentioned.
I have yet to see this as a problem for the US. I like my DSL, and have my doubts that wireless can ever beat wires for large broadband.
If I have the phone, and don't answer, and don't return the call - I will get grilled as to why I didn't when I return home from at 2am.
Maybe I was out trashing, looking for that discarded Pentium box companies seem to leave out now and then? Gotta turn the phone off, to keep security off my back. It won't matter to the GF - she thinks you were cheating!
Or how about the boss that calls you on the weekend to come in - right now - or be fired! - while you are at the beach? Your boss can't reach you if you don't have one - "Sorry boss, I was at the beach with my family Saturday - I did get your answering machine message when I returned at 8pm, though!".
In other words, I know I am not the slave of the phone, and the people calling know that as well - they think you are their slave...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Since I moved cross-country to Victoria, BC to begin school last September, I decided to grab a digital cellphone so I would have a chance to place and receive calls while I looked for a place to live. Fortunately, I live in Canada where we have some excellent digital providers and I was able to get a phone which works nationwide with no roaming charges. I am not a heavy phone user so it was not usually a problem to have a limit on my talk time per month. I ended up after some experimentation choosing 200 minutes and unlimited weekends each month. My phone bills were probably a little bit more than a normal landline each month but the phone allowed me to be more flexible in my usage. I consistenly brought it with me and was never out of touch when needed.
The greatest problem that I found without having a landline was the issue of Internet access. As I was computerless for a good portion of my first year, this did not pose a problem. When I finally was able to pickup a cheap used laptop, I would have loved to have a phoneline to access the Internet. Installing a highspeed connection simply wasn't an option in my case because I was moving shortly. However, high speed is obviously the way to go. Once you have tasted the speed, dialup simply is not an option.
Although I travelled rarely, we have an excellent digital coverage area in the major centers of Canada.
I never had no phone access due to faulty celltowers or some company problem. Only once or twice while I was in a known digital area did I notice my phone revert to analog mode and I had my phone on all the time! I cannot say that this is a norm but I am lucky to have a good company.
Would I recommend this as an alternative to a landline? Yes, with reservations. It has to be the right situation for you. Obviously, it might not work for families, or even couples. But, It might work for you.
I have a PCS phone, and usually have a bill around $50 - $75. The various governments here in New York (Albany County, Albany 911, New York, Federal Gov't, Saratoga County) feel the need to tax me between $7 and $12 per month as well.
15% taxes is quite steep. Until the government gets their mitts off of wireless technology, I think the technology will remain out of reach for many people.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I can't get DSL where I'm at, so I'm stuck with cable modem. I use a cell phone for work, so I've ditched the hard line service. $30/month I don't have to put up with. But yes, coverage sucks in the US. The concept of "national coverage" is very new here, as opposed to a patchwork of agreements between tower operators, which is still predominant and probably still comprises US national coverage plans.
If you don't answer the cell phone, people assume you're ignoring them.
If you don't answer your home phone, people assume (surprise!) you're not home.
I don't know why, that's just how it is for me. I am expected, for work, to answer my cell phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Needless to say, my batteries die.. a lot.
BTW, someone asked about pricing plans. I'm on AT&T "One-Rate"; 1700 minutes a month, $149.99. Yes, I use them. (Try doing mobile tech support for a company that has 39 offices and two tech support guys.) Quality is great, coverage is spotty (in the Midwest) only in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.
My reality check bounced.