Cut the Cord

In my family, we only use our cell phones. There's no landline coming into our house (or rather, the line coming into our house has no service).

It's scary making the move to go totally wireless, but in my case, it works well for us. It was very expensive to pay Sprint for local service, pay to have the priviledge of being able to make a long distance call, pay for the long distance calls themselves, and then use that phone primarily to take calls from telemarketers and bill collectors. And since we needed cell phones anyways, we had to pay for that service too (that's where the expensive part came from, because we were essentially paying twice for monthly phone service).

Cell phones are priced about the same as landlines, at least in our case. We have 2 phones that share the same 500 minutes, plus we have free nights and weekends, plus we have some kind of in network calling so we don't eat minutes talking to each other. Plus we get free long distance (included in the minutes), and have all of the same call waiting, caller id and 3-way calling that we had on the landline (included in the service). And to top it off, each phone has its own voicemail. And, what's even better is that there's laws or regulations or something that automatically prevents telemarketers from random calling on cell phone exchanges. All of this for about the same price that we were paying Sprint Local each month.

On the downside, we can't use services like Tivo or DirectTV that require a landline to phone home. And our friends and family need to know 2 numbers to reach us (even though our phone numbers are only 1 digit apart). And despite the fact that we absolutely love Verizon's nationwide coverage, they are kind of nazi's in regards to how you can use your equipment (i.e., my T730 has all kinds of features that I can't use because they have been locked out by Verizon).

The ironic and funny thing is that when you sign up for wireless service, they ask for a landline number that you can be reached at. ;-)