Why do people have a cell phone and a landline phone?

We are in an area prone to hurricanes. Usually the land lines are back up and running before cell towers. Reception on the land line is better here and multiple people can pick up on land line extensions that are better than trying to listen in on a cell speaker.

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I still have a landline since I use Tracfone for my cell service. For my usage pattern, it is far cheaper than most if not all unlimited talk services. But the landline has zero operating cost since I use obi with google voice.

A

Tonight t-mobile has gone down. No phone calls, no texting. Thank God for my landline.

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My phone can use either cell towers or WiFi, but the default when home is voice over WiFi. I’ve never had it happen that both WiFi and cell towers go out at the same time. I’m in the Atlanta area, so we don’t have hurricanes. I suppose a tornado could take out both cell towers and WiFi. But if it did that, the phone wires would likely be down too. If everything were down I could always drive to a live cell tower if I really needed a connection. Try that with a landline. :smiley:

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I think I have some extensions in a box somewhere if someone wants to give it a go. :slight_smile:

My comment was mean as humor, considering the timing. It didn’t really require a response. But Ok.

Now I see the humor! I see in my newsfeed this morning that T-Mobile phone service was down for up to 12 hours starting at noon yesterday in some areas of the country. I wasn’t affected here in an Atlanta suburb. Anyway, your point taken. I was trying for humor too, offering to take a landline phone extension out of the house to a cell tower and making it work. Oh well, a lot of humor, and meaning gets lost in message texts. Peace and stay safe out there.

Voila :smiley:

We had a single point of failure last year. Our small town is connected via a single fiber cable to the internet. All phone calls are routed via the internet nowadays. Even those called by mobile phone. A construction site in our town’s centre scratched this single fiber. It took 2 hours until we were online again by landline and cell phone.

Yes. Texting falls short when it comes to humor. You stay safe down there in Atlanta. It doesn’t seem to take much these days to set people off

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While I Live in a decent sized city. I’m in a valley with zero cellular service. I’m lucky if I get 1 bar. So having a landline is essential for us.

Plus, only friends and family have my cell phone number. 90% of the spam calls go to the landline. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

@Dani we had the same issue maybe 10 years ago in the town I lived in in Southern California out in the high desert. A road construction crew accidentally cut the one fiber connection into town. All the internet, all the landline and cell phones, all the ATMs, all the credit card swipers, everything went down. Took over 24 hours to repair. It was really weird. And that was in a town with one of the US’ major weapons testing facilities. (Same location as the July 4/5 earthquakes in 2019…that’s when we knew for sure we were high tailing it out of there.)

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Some keep it for their Fax machines.

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Good point. Forgot about that.

Fax’s can be sent to an email address thats how my work did.

I believe that might be a “pay for” service…

No it’ just takes the right software and no I don’t know which one you would need as I am retired now and we don’t have any need to receive fax.

I do have a monthly report to send in. After I fill out the form I print it out sign it since it requires a accual signature take a picture and email it to the office which meets their requirments.

My wife used to be able to bike to work and kept getting flats (broken glass). She doesn’t change bike tires, so I’d get called… if she could find someone willing to let her use their phone. So she got a mobile phone at that point.

A couple years later, we needed to keep two land lines (locations A and B, different cities). Ditching two land lines and getting me a mobile phone was cheaper, even 20 years ago.

It was somewhat awkward in the early days of mobile phones (I have memories of both of us leaning in to hear the speaker phone on her mobile phone). Now, we can do three-way calls for no additional cost, and of course some family members prefer texting, some prefer video calls, etc. The mobile phone can do all that these days, allowing me to keep in touch with more people.

I keep a landline for captioning . . . which I need, especially for business calls citing numbers, etc. I realize the cell phone has innocaption, but I have been disappointed in that service in the past . . . it’s availability or not.

We have a landline so that ~all business calls about home maintenance can go there and my wife and I can reserve our cell phones mostly for private personal use. The “landline” is actually an AT&T AC-powered cellular home phone with a lithium ion backup battery for power outages. So it’s the phone that’s on 24x7, the security company can always call first and there are several base stations for it around the house. We know folks that only own a cell phone - they get into a far reach of their house, leaving their cell phone behind somewhere and don’t hear us calling them. We usually hear our “landline” ringing from anywhere in the house and since it’s hooked up to a cordless phone set of stations, I can take a cordless handset out into the yard or forward the home phone number to my cell phone to receive a call anywhere I go.

I turn my cell phone off when I’m asleep and most of the time when I’m at home. I’d rather wear out the life of an El Cheapo AT&T phone rather than leave my cell phone on just in case someone calls me. And the strategy seems to work in that ~all SPAM and robocalls go to our home line, not our mobile phone lines.

I think there is no correct answer to the question. The question is like, “Why does anyone need more than one vehicle or more than one residence?!” or “Why does anyone need more than one or two hobbies?!” Depending on one’s life situation, more than one of any of the above may be useful or not.

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Yes. Ks9 has telecoil and bluetooth :slight_smile: