US Telco Support > AT&T > AT&T U-verse > How is life without a "home" telephone number?

reply to tberg

Re: How is life without a "home" telephone number?

reply to bashful9999
We got rid of the regular phone company line and switched for a voip line (from voip.ms) in Q1 2011. It's been 1.5 years and in looking at my total expenditure for equipment and service, it's been $202 to 7/1/2012 - that's about $125 in actual calls and $97 in equipment and initial set up.

Of course, your mileage will vary but voip.ms charges about 1.5 cents per minute for incoming and 1 cent per minute for outgoing calls (metered at 6 second increments). There is no charge for calls to toll free (e.g. 800, 866, ...) numbers. International call rates are also very competitive. The fee is $1.50/month + $1.50 for E911 + usage fees.

Because it's voip based, you are relying on your broadband connection to make calls - and if your broadband is out, you can not make calls. For that, I have cell phones as back ups.

voip.ms supports E911 - where you register your address with them so that when you dial 911 from the phone, they know how to route your call.

For the equipment, we have a wired Grandstream SIP phone (fixed in place) and a wireless dect phone plugged in to a LINKSYS PAP2T-NA SIP VOIP Phone Adapter. Both the Grandstream and the Linksys then plug into our internet router. You also should have some way of setting up QOS properly so that voip traffic can be prioritized over other internet traffic.

The cool thing about this setup is when I traveled to Europe recently, I'm able to use a voip client on my cell phone and reroute my home number to ring on my cell phone as if I was at home. (However, this only works well when you have good connectivity on your cell phone - wifi or really fast HSPDA.)

I have not tried faxing through this line so can not speak to that. But for fax, I ended up getting a scanner and used an online service for faxing (much more convenient, I feel, than having to deal with an actual fax machine).

For cell phones, because of the way we use them (or don't use them as much), we switched to prepaid plans for 3 lines and have 1 line with a minimal number of minutes and a very basic data package.

This is not directly answering the original poster's questions - but this is what we have set up and it's working for me. While we did not switch to just use our mobile lines - mostly because of international calls AND I feel that cell phone companies charge too much for their plans. But if you are going with unlimited plans anyway (and the economics on those work), then it will work I believe. Otherwise, a better priced home phone plan is definitely better.

On the international calls from cell phones, I've had success in the past with using third party calling services where they charge better rates than the mobile phone company. The annoyance there is having to dial some code before the actual number.

reply to bashful9999
I have not had a land line since 2001 or so.

My wife and I have Mobile Phones.

She has Magic Jack but it is rarely used.

MIL whom lives with us has a mobile and Magic Jack.

The Magic Jacks could disappear tomorrow and only my MIL would notice.

Dave

reply to bashful9999
re: #3

FWIW, I've made two 911 calls with my cell phone.

The first occurred when I saw some kids damaging a public building. I called 911, and gave the name of the building and the address (number and street), but neglected to give the city. The operator thought I was in the nearby suburb (about 10 miles away) where I had purchased my cell phone. It took a minute to clear up that confusion.

And once I was at my Dad's (over a year ago) when I needed to call 911 for him. I used my cell phone. While waiting for the ambulance, I asked the 911 operator if she could get any location info for me on the call since I was using my cell phone. She said no. (My location setting on my cell phone is set to "on".)

reply to bashful9999
I know the bottom line is that you want to give up your Land Lines and only use your Cell. I retired from AT&T, so I am very familiar with Phones. I had two Verizon Land Lines like you, and a Cell Phone. I still have one Verizon Line and one Ooma Line and a Cell. I believe in diversity, and have gone through some service affecting events. The Telco Land Lines always seem to come through in times of need. You'd think the Cell Phones are reliable, but they are not and you always get a Dial Tone with a Telco Land Line. So now you have to weigh your options on what is important and make a decision.

reply to AnonFTW

reply to bashful9999
One thing I would like to add to all of this:

When we had a 5.4 Earthquake a few years back in Southern California, within *seconds* the entire cellular network was overloaded for more then an hour, because everyone was making (or trying to make) the "are you OK" calls.

But guess what, after 2 tries on my cell phone to reach my wife, I picked up my office desk phone and called the home: Landlines worked perfect!

It wasn't a big earthquake, and I believe very few people got hurt, if any. However, if a quake of larger size would hit, you can pretty much *guarantee* the cell phone network is the first to go.

Granted depending on severity of the quake the phone infrastructure could also be damaged, but past quakes have shown that the old traditional phone network is rather resilient. The poles mostly just sway, only when it really serious they might get knocked over.

The cell phone issue is still an issue being discussed by politicians here, but AT&T and Verizon say it would cost too much to ensure that virtually *everyone* has an available line. And as such, as almost everyone will try to reach their loved ones making the "are you OK" calls, it is VERY MUCH expected that the cell phone network will be dead within 60 seconds after an earthquake.

A similar thing happened when DC got hit with that 5.9 quake last year.

The official advice from the folks who think about emergency preparedness etc, is: If you need to communicate in the aftermath of an earthquake, make sure you have a land line available to you.

When Katrina struck by the way, nothing was safe..... but cell phones were the *first* to go, land lines lasted a few more hours until the CO's got flooded by water.

Further in-land, cell phones remained off-line for weeks, where land-lines were often restored withing 24-48 hours, mostly by putting generators at the CO in areas where there was power loss, and the phone network was kept afloat. As most of the cell phone towers feed into a local CO somewhere to connect to the phone network, it was imperative to get those up first with generators, and it would reach a much larger area of customers that might need a means of communication.

Now, all of this doesn't matter AT ALL if you don't live anywhere near a major natural disaster area, but still....

That said, my U-Verse voice requires power, so I will probably be screwed when the "big one" hits. It has a UPS, but that only lasts a few hours.
--
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!"

I was actually in NO during the first few days after Katrina. My cell phone (Verizon) worked perfectly. I did get the occasional fast busy signal but a retry usually connected. Landlines, as you noted, we're out. I think in the event of a catastrophe, all bets are off anyways.

So this past Tuesday, I unplugged both Uverse lines. I've not cancelled yet....thought I'd do a cold turkey dry run with family first. We bought a 5-handset Panasonic set with Link-to-Cell feature and paired up both my wife's iPhone and my own. So far, works perfectly. The handsets even play our unique ringtones so we can tell which phone is ringing through. Not a single unwanted call thus far and all is working fine.

I'm still considering a "red phone" Option...the MagicJack Plus may serve that purpose. I'd just leave the phone on silent mode and disable messages. Not a landline but might be enough for my intended purposes.

reply to bashful9999
So much better. Right now I live at home, and my parents have a landline, but I don't use it. When I move out in the next couple of months, I will be cell-only. It's so much easier to just have one number you can be reached at, not have other phones to deal with, and have all your contacts in one place. Cell only is definitely the way of the future. With unlimited, you don't have to worry about minutes, and it sounds like you'll do well under Share Everything, although most of the cell phone plans drown you in so many minutes anyways that it's nearly impossible to use even half of them.

reply to bashful9999