The decline of the landline (opens in new tab)

I was about there get a landline because my iPhone keeps cutting out in my basement/home office. Does anyone have a better alternative?

Is it worth calling ATT?

I'm tempted to just get an Android phone?

When it comes to quality, landlines beat just about every other telephony solution in every way. Everything from latency, to audio quality, to reliability. They're also quite cheap compared to cell phone service (in the US, anyway).

Maybe some people just don't care and would rather have one phone they use for everything, but I don't plan on dropping my landline any time soon.

The only strong case I see is if you have a small child in the house. We have a 6 month old...and having a landline seemed like a small price for additional security and connectivity if I need immediate access - dont want to boot skype or pray for an AT&T cell signal as I run around my apartment in a crisis

I don't get all these problems everyone seems to have with AT&T. I have a blackberry bold and it works just fine, I am hardly ever in an area where there's not coverage and I hardly ever get dropped calls. Maybe its the blackberry, or maybe its because I live in a city, but i haven't used a landline for years. I've not worked at a company that has them for years either. like public callboxes, they are a relic of the past.

"India has an elegant reverse-auction scheme, under which the supplier who asks for least cash to supply a particular area wins the contract."

Did anyone get this sentence ?

I have dry-loop DSL and a VOIP phone line. I guess that's a landline, though not a traditional one (way too expensive for what it offers).

I don't spend much time on the phone and I recently dropped my own landline to save a few bucks. I bought a Tracfone last Christmas. After some discount I had, it was about $145 for 14 months prepaid -- including phone, minutes, and double minutes for life. As long as I don't go over about an hour of calls a month (and so far I'm doing even less than that), it will work out to just over $10/mo for the first 14 months. My landline was around $50/mo. I kept the landline as long as I did in part for a reason I don't seem to see mentioned here: If there is a natural disaster and power is out and you need to call emergency services, you can pick up your landline and it will work. Of course, this assumes you have an old fashioned phone hooked up to your landline and not one of those newfangled wireless phones. Those require electricity to work.

The next time I buy minutes for my Tracfone, I plan to get another $100 card good for another year. So next year, my "monthly" (average) phone bill will be even less than it is now, assuming of course I continue to use the phone very sparingly.