https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/att-wants-to-remove-landline-service-california-18659093.php
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My landline is from comcast. One gimmick is inbound calls and phone numbers appear on my TV for about 20 seconds. Neat.
We haven’t had a landline in 5 years. Transferred the number to Google Voice so that we could keep it. Check it once a month and its all telemarketing calls.
That’s why I love names / numbers display on my TV.
[but I would never recommend comcast]
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Technically not a landline, but an IP phone. When I had Comcast/Xfinity I did really like that feature.
It has to be really expensive for telcos to maintain all that infrastructure when they likely have very few subscribers. I wonder if they even run lines into new subdivisions?
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I ditched telco landlines about 20 years ago.
I now have Obi desk phones that connect to a VOIP provider. I was able to also configure my Google Voice numbers so I had a physical inbound and outbound phone for the GV number. That option has now been depricated, so y’all missed out. Since mine is already configured it will work for the foreseeable future.
It also lets me link to my cellphone to make and receive calls. As long as the phhone has power, that would work even if the local Internet was down.
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About 6 years ago, the only connection I could get was from a wireless ISP (Rise Broadband). Rural location, one telco exchange outside of metro area. They took it down and refused to repair it, so I resorted to trying dialup on the good old POTS line. Verizon had dumped the service on Frontier which like Verizon did almost nothing. The line was so noisy I could barely download email. In years past it was good enough to feed the whole house. I left it in the rear view mirror and first question asked of seller here was “What do you do for internet?”
The answer was Commie Cast. I came, plugged in cable modem, router, and Obi box per Mark’s teaching, and have never looked back. Don’t even know who does POTS locally.
I feel sorry for rural dwellers who cannot even get cell phone service. AT least now we have some low altitude satellites like Starlink as an alternative.
I have Starlink and live rurally without a cell signal. Without power, which goes off at least once or twice a month here and is the last to be restored in favor of more heavily populated areas, Starlink does no good at all, given the router needs power. I am currently being gouged monthly by ATT for my landline, without any long distance even. I have a Google Voice number, but that is of zero use without power to my router. ATT swears I can get fiber service here but I’ve tried twice and both times was told by the tech that it was not possible, this after turning off my existing service and leaving it off for three days and not restoring it until I drove into town to get a cell signal, jumping through all the hoops they have in place so you have to work very very hard to get a real person and getting hung up on several times in the process. In my experience with ATT, they do not care about me at all, despite that I’ve been a loyal customer for 19 years. They turned off my DSL for four months forcing me to drive to town daily to access my bank accounts, etc., claiming they were waiting for a part, which was not true. Filing a complaint with the FCC did absolutely nothing! Despite what they contend in their article, there IS NO other way for me to communicate in a power outage or during an emergency situation if I am unable to drive to town on the single, often flooded and impassable, egress from my neighborhood.
For emergency power there is always a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) [Costco has one on sale this month], which would give you minutes to maybe an hour dpending upon power draw of your equipment. You also could get a small gas or propane generator to plug into. These certainly will not give you days of service, and I’m sure that you don’t want to foot the bill for a solar electric system.
Here, Spectrum cable has a fiber internet with a builtin UPS but that UPS only lasts for short outages.