We finally went ahead and did it. We cancelled our Vonage service after nearly five years. It has nothing to do with Vonage (although the price did seem to keep creeping up) and everything to do with landline phones feeling obsolete. Hell, in the course of updating the house and getting it to our liking we’ve covered two existing phone jacks – long before we knew we would do this. I dunno. It just seems like something that isn’t needed anymore. I can now continue to make the house phone jack free as we update.
It just felt like the house phone never got used. In the past month there’s been exactly six calls to the house landline and in every case it’s a sales call (for some reason Time Warner started calling recently) or a reminder on an appointment. No one made a single outgoing call. It was like paying for nothing. So I ported the landline number to Verizon and added a line to our plan. This simplifies changing the house number for things like the school, doctors, bank accounts and such. I activated one of our old phones on that line, tossed the phone on the desk and presto! We have what amount to a home line. It’s just that it’s a cell phone with the old house number and it’s just $9.99 a month on Verizon.
So yeah, the future is now. We’re flying free and I feel liberated, man. Liberated.
Maybe I’m just old and grumpy, but I like my copper line. Granted, we have DSL, so it’s going to be there anyway. But my cell phone is work provided and my wife’s is a prepaid phone that just doesn’t even keep charged. I don’t want my work phone to be the primary household phone.
Plus I still don’t trust the 911 system with cell phones. And I like that it works without power. The traditional phone is my one anti-technology quirk. :)
[...] a phone jack to connect the routers (it is DSL after all) and quite frankly, even though we just cut the landline phone cord 6 weeks ago (working out great, BTW), I’ve had it in mind since before we bought this house. [...]