Recent studies indicate that approximately 20% of United States households have completely disconnected their home or land line phones and are operating completely from cellular or VoIP phone services. There are an additional 13% of individuals who still are paying for land-line phone service, but never make use of it. If you’re still getting dinged for $30.00, $40.00, $50.00 by your monopoly telecommunications provider for a monthly phone bill, it’s a great time to reconsider if you really even need your land line phone anymore.
The CITA wireless association reported that a full 82% of Americans now have cellular phones. If you don’t fall into the slim minority of individuals that still operate completely from a land-line based phone, you might want to consider using your cell-phone service as your primary means of communication and drop your land-line once and for all. If you keep both services, it’s almost like you’re paying for the same service twice. Would you write a check for both cable and dial-up internet each month if you had to?
Many people who make little use of their land-line phones keep them around for emergency issues. During natural disasters, often cell-phone systems do not work because of a loss of power to the communications towers, but often traditional land-lines still work. Although this is an unlikely situation, many use it as an excuse to keep their phone line. If this is a concern for you and you have a cable or DSL modem, you might consider that the cable-lines and DSL-lines were equally unaffected during hurricane Katrina and many used VoIP services to communicate with the outside world. You could switch to a much more affordable Skype or other VoIP as a backup to your cell-phone for those types of emergency situations.
Many might not view their $30.00 or $40.00 monthly phone payment as a major cost, but over a period of time that money could be invested and it could add up to being a pretty sizeable asset. If you are paying $42.00 per month for phone-service, that would equate to $500.00 per year of savings. I don’t know about you, but that’s a little bit much to pay for the possibility of the ability to access a phone during an emergency situation.
If your land-line is sitting around going un-used, except by the telemarketers who enjoy calling you, seriously consider dropping your land line phone once and for all and embracing the future by going cell-phone only