MSU Red Cedar Message Board

Why not a prepaid cell that you leave at home if your usage is going to be low? $.089 per minute ($.09/day maintenance fee) with STI Mobile. That was the only provider I could find that didn't have a minute expiration, but even if you go with one of the more well known providers (Net10, etc) you're only looking at like $20 and you're not dependent on the power grid and your Internet provider being up.

I don't understand the kid argument. I had this same conversation with one of my buddies who still has a landline, he said hemainly only had it for his kid and babysitters. Don't most kids over the age of 8 have cell phones these days anyway? Why not just get a pre-paid cell or, if you're married, just leave one of your phones at home?

Some phone compainies, for some reason, make it cheaper to have internet/cable/phone than to just have internet and cable.

I added a Verizon family plan line, $9.99 mo, transferred the land line number to it, got a cheap free cell phone and cancelled the land line. We take the phone with us when we travel so we don't miss calls to the home number and callers don't know that we're away (think our house is occupied).

I can see both sides of the argument.
People can come up with some pretty bizarre "one in a million" scenarios where a landline would be better than a cell phone.

For instance, you fell down the stairs and you can't speak... but you manage to crawl to a phone, dial 911 and then pass out. The 911 dispatch can still determine your location with a landline, but they cannot with a cell phone.

The other argument is that cell phone batteries die. Your babysitter or kids may have forgotten to charge phones, then the babysitter is home alone with your kids and you call to check on them, phone goes to VM, wife starts freaking out... etc. Or, cell phones get left in coat pockets, ringers are turned off, etc.

Landlines are clearly obsolete, but for some people with kids, the peace of mind of a landline may be worth it.

I haven't had a land line since I moved out of the dorms in 1997.

For the past 5 years or so, all cell phones transmit your location (either from GPS or cellular triangulation) when you dial 911. Part of the enhanced 911 guidelines.

Nice!!

Think I know the answer, but would a VoIP phone die/not work if the home had a power outage?

we droped our landline last spring. We did "port" our home phone number to a new cell phone in our plan. We wanted to keep the home number available for the people that still call that. Although, a lot of people simply use - and know - our cell numbers.

Correct, but the accuracy is somewhere between 50 and 300 yards.
Unless you live in the sticks, you're relying on cops going door-to-door to find a 911 caller that is unresponsive.

Good luck with that. I can't even get Chicago cops to respond when my home alarm system is going off. 300 yards in the city could equal a few hundred residential units, depending on the neighborhood.

What's a landline?

You sure you don't mean 'landmine' ?

Generally yeah, unless you add UPS protection to both the voip phone / router / modem etc.

I made the same point to my wife, that the last two times we called 911, we did from cell phones (once due to a tree coming down on our power drop!) but she still likes having a "landline".