Landlines? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Landlines!

from the there-they-go... dept

Tue, Feb 8th 2005 2:11pm — Mike Masnick

The landline telephone is dying. While it's still a small percentage of the overall, there's been quite a bit of growth in the number of homes with no landline in the US. It seems that people are realizing they can get their internet access via broadband and their phone service via broadband or cellular. Of course, how do you count those of us who technically have a landline thanks to SBC's refusal to offer naked DSL, but don't know the phone number and most certainly don't have an actual telephone hooked up to that landline? Yes, it's a total waste, but it's still cheaper and more reliable than cable. Meanwhile, things are even more dramatic in places like India, where 90% of new telephone signups are for mobile phones rather than land lines.

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10 Comments

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GkBoy, 8 Feb 2005 @ 3:10pm

More reliable than cable?
Here in Johnson County Kansas we have two cable providers, Time Warner and Everest. They are both more reliable than SBC, who seems to still have trouble even connecting their customers. I have had only one outage at my house in the last 18 months. The telco customers have had five. I'll keep my phone on cable.
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dorpus, 8 Feb 2005 @ 3:20pm

What if
For now, cell phones are a new industry. But as we can see, cell phones are exacting a price in social civility. Humans are exclusive by social nature. Could there be an exclusivist aesthetic, by which the lowly rabble are shouting into cell phones all the time, but more worthy people do their business behind closed doors?
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gpancner, 8 Feb 2005 @ 4:44pm

dsl more reliable than cable?
You must not have Comcast. I do, and it is a lot more reliable and faster than Qwest's DSL.
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- Mike (profile), 8 Feb 2005 @ 4:52pm
  
  Re: dsl more reliable than cable?
  I did have Comcast. I no longer do.
  
  The fact that it was down for most of October contributed to that.
  
  Every day at 9am the service would go down, and a phone call would tell me about "scheduled maintenance" and that I would be down for the day, but they couldn't tell me if it would happen again the next day. A month of that is just too much... especially when they refuse to refund money for a month of downtime.
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Anonymous Coward, 8 Feb 2005 @ 5:52pm

No Subject Given
This study is from November 2003, no?
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Aaron, 8 Feb 2005 @ 5:59pm

no more landlines
The no-landline thing could be an issue. And this should be a big story nobody's thought of yet (yay me!) ... An example why this is a BAD thing.. Dell uses your area code and zip code to locate the nearest service provider to perform onsite service. When customers provide cellphones from other areas, the engineer shows up in the location of the phone, and not the address of the customer, so a customer calling from Austin TX, with a 214 (dallas) phone number gets a tech calling them from Dallas wondering why their address is in Austin.... yes it's wacky but that's the way it is! It drives customers nuts! I'm not sure how other companies do it, but it's probably going to be an issue!

Speaking of.. my wife just won 4 Motorola v300 phones and $2000 in t-mobile minutes...dumping the landline tomorrow ;P
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Anton, 8 Feb 2005 @ 6:20pm

DSL vs Cable?
I had Ameritech/SBC DSL for a year, ending aobut 3 years ago. Not only couldn't they keep the line up for more than a week straight, it'd take 2-3 hours on the phone to schedule someone to come out and look at the lines. Of course, the problem would "fix" itself in the day or two it'd take the tech to get to my place and he could never find a problem.
I moved to a location with cable internet, serviced by Wide Open West. I've had a connection for 3 years now, pay less than DSL cost, and my total down time is under six hours, and almost all between midnight and 6am in their maintenance window.
Comcast in this area (north of Detroit) seems to have a pretty good record. My friends who use it are all happy with the speed and rarely have outages.
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Phil, 9 Feb 2005 @ 6:11am

No Subject Given
I brought this up a few minutes ago at broadbandreports: As far as I know, if one has DirecTV or DISHNetwork, one is still required to have a landline phone to be able to update any of their respective receivers.
Therefore, if I'm the first to bring this concept up, I get a cut from whomever comes up with the technology to alleviate this situation!!
Enjoy,
-maestro7
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Paul, 9 Feb 2005 @ 6:52am

A few issues with getting rid of the landline
As one person pointed out, DirecTV does require a phone line if you want to order movies directly through the box.

Also, there are some local utilities (here in No. VA), the require a landline phone number in order to get service.

Finally, we use a few cell phones for our business lines (and a toll-free for the customer interface) and it is a pain in the neck to get things like an SSL certificate because they use the phone book to verify that you are a "real company". In lieu of that, I have to get documents notarized. Since when did the phone company want proof that I am a "real business"?

Landlines will be around for a while.
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Will Molnar, 16 Jun 2008 @ 8:44am

Landline phone for diretv?
Getting different answers to my question.
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