Posts Tagged ‘cable phone service’
Call me old school but we still have a ‘land-line’ telephone at home. However a year or so ago we bundled our internet and cable service to include our telephone service. There was a financial incentive to do so at the time. I am actually not sure that is still the case.
Another aspect is that when the phone rings at home it is nearly never for me. There are few people that call me at home – those that know me call me on my mobile or at work. Consequently I try to avoid answering the phone at home even though we have caller ID.
Hurricane Irene (which actually ended up being a tropical storm by the time it reached us in Connecticut), wrought havoc with so many things including our cable, internet and telephone service. My wife was able to route the calls to her mobile phone – which was just fine by me since they would not be for me anyway.
Yesterday we woke up to having no home phone service. When we reached our cable provider they told us they could schedule a service call Sunday from 2-5 (it was Thursday), or the following Tuesday from 8-11. Who are these guys – the phone company? The cable and internet continue to work and for whatever reason my wife can receive calls to our house on her mobile phone once again. But we are unable to dial out of the house for what will be at least the better part of a week. What kind of service is this?
At one point having a home security system necessitated having an actual land line since the system was routed through phone lines. But then if your phone line is out so is your security system. I have no idea now that I think of it how our security system is tethered at present.
What does it all mean? Well for one thing that I am seriously thinking about NOT having a telephone land line anymore (my wife will no doubt have something to say about that). Both of our children do not have land lines and operate only on their mobile phone. It’s only a problem if the phone is not charged – or it gets lost. I noticed a statistic this week that apparently a mobile phone is reported missing within one hour. However, reporting a lost or stolen wallet takes much longer. There’s no doubt about what people value more.
With service like what our cable is offering I sure hope our cable and internet don’t go out.
Are you still tethered to a land line? Thinking about cutting the cord?
Posted in Communication, Customer Experiences | Tags: cable phone service, Caller Id, Hurricane Irene, Mobile phone at home
The better question might be why haven’t I? The cable company that delivers our cable TV and internet service has been advertising a triple option to include cable phone service. You get to keep your telephone number (thanks to a government statute enacted several years ago) and the premise is that overall you will spend less by combining services. And this is certainly true in year one but subsequently it the gap closes a bit but overall it is still less expensive to have cable phone service than a traditional land line.
For years the argument against cable telephone service was that if the cable service went out – so would your phone service. And while all of us at my house had mobile service (spotty service due to where we live), emergency calls might be a problem from a mobile phone (turns out that’s not true).
Last week like many areas in the United States the Northeast was hit by severe thunderstorms and our area on Wednesday in Connecticut in particular. We lost power for nearly 24 hours and many people lost power for much longer than that. But we also lost our home landline phone service at the same time.
Fortunately mobile phones work well enough at our house to be a reliable back up. We have a small generator so we had limited power (no air-conditioning!), and still the phone was out and when we called AT & T told us we would have phone service back after the weekend on Tuesday (tomorrow).
That’s a week without home phone service folks. Since I rarely use the phone at home it was no real hardship for me (come to think of it only my wife really uses the phone at home) or our daughter. Tue result is we are going to dump our AT & T home phone service since the whole reason for keeping it turns out to not be valid.
It’s in keeping with the way telecommunication companies view phone service now with the majority of their focus being (and rightly so) on mobile service. Yet it still amazes me that AT & T could consider a residence without phone service for a week to be acceptable. It’s exceedingly obvious that they’ve given up that ship by their action – or inaction.
Our son has no landline where he lives in Florida – and I doubt he ever will nor will our daughter. People under 30 roll their eyes at the notion of a landline saying – ‘what for?’
So how about you? Do you still have landline phone service at home? Why?