How Do Folks Get By Using Only A Mobile At Home With No Land line?

Are your cell phones Android or iPhone?  One nice feature on iPhone now is that your cell can ring on all your devices. So if you throw a watch and pad into the mix, or a watch and laptop, they all ring when your cell rings (if you enable it that way.)  So just wear they watch around the house. Don’t need to carry any phones. Gets phone ringing on your wrist anywhere you have cell or WiFi signals (assuming your cell provider has WiFi calling, in some particular setup types.) Also has the nice feature of supporting silent ring with tapping your wrist when you don’t want to disturb anyone but still want to be notified of calls. And has programmable do not disturb times/incoming call controls.

Transfers can be as simple as adding your family member to the call (which works for any phone number, not just numbers inside your house.). Not something we do much of here, but could be used that way.

If you’ll never wear a watch around the house or can’t stand Apple products, then this probably isn’t for you...

Funny thing, we still have a land line here. We pay entirely too much to Verizon for it and really only use it for all the marketing that asks for a phone number.   
 
(Wow, what’s up with the posting editor?  I just did an edit an the posted showed up in normal view with html markup included...
 
You say "watch" and I'll bet @UpStateMike is thinking:
 
640px-Pocket_Watch_%28Savonette%29.jpg

 
:D
 
Craig
 
(Wow, what’s up with the posting editor?  I just did an edit an the posted showed up in normal view with html markup included...
 
It happens randomly.  You have to then go to advanced editor and you will typically see it presented correctly, then save.  If you want too long then you cannot fix it and need to wipe it and rewrite the post.
 
it's been like this for years. 
 
LarrylLix said:
Copper telephone lines in the rural max out fairly low unless you have fibre within 2km IIRC.
The cable TV coax lines, once you upgrade do not offer anything less than 30Gbps and unlimited bandwidth now. I upgraded to get Netflix a few months back but had to agree I could never go back to a 150GB cap for $40 per month. Makes sense as they can now throw away all their metering and billing complexities. The no cap per month changes the way you think about data though. Alexa radio srations and unlimited streaming becomes an every day normality.
 
Haha. Looks like they're not even offering copper wire Internet service here anymore. They only offer mobile service for a lot more. Looks like 25Gbps is the speed.
 
Attaching a screenshot failed as the size is not allowed here.
 
You're saying Gigabits, but you mean Megabits... right?
 
Frunple said:
You're saying Gigabits, but you mean Megabits... right?
ooooops! Thanks. Yes the speeds should be Mbps (but they are really big Mega bits per second!!  :D )  The data caps are all in GBytes.
 
Modifying my posts. Good catch.
 
I for one are happy the world has gone to IP.  We get Internet from a local provider with a small dish on the roof. It points to a mountain a few miles away with an antenna.  I guess I show my age when I remember how much AT&T phone service cost, and they charged extra for "touch tone" service.  And remember how "long distance" cost so much that you couldn't speak to relatives for long.  What does OOma cost? Maybe $3/month plus $130/year for some other features. 
 
Then there was cable. Yes, you had to pay for each TV for a while, then you didn't but still had to "rent" the converter box. A year ago I had DirecTV, which was an improvement but still paying $130/month for pretty basic service.  More than half of that was for "box rental." 
 
I now have Sling TV for $25/month, get all the same channels, installed an antenna for local TV, added some DVR boxes for recording.  With Netflix and Amazon Prime I pay 1/3 of what I used to. If I want HBO for a month, its $15, and I can turn it off if I don't want it.  I can watch any of it anywhere on my phone also.
 
If Sling doesn't work out, I can switch to any of 5 or 10 other services.  No two year contract, no sending all the stupid boxes back.
 
I can't ever imagine going back to those days.

I should add, I get 1,000 GB per month, and use maybe 350 GB on average. Stay away from the large ISP if you can. They sell your info, slow your speeds if they don't like what you are streaming, and for the most part, are evil.
 
My biggest concern with VOIP or any other IP based product is the "single point of failure" issue. If your router dies, your done. No phone, no TV, no automation (for some folks), and possible no access to music if you depend solely on streaming services. I recently purchased a second router to sit as a cold standby after my main router glitched and looked for a while like it wasn't ever going to boot again. Fortunately it dd but it really brought home how many things die without a router and how ugly it would be to configure a new one from scratch (over 200 dhcp reservations, etc.)
 
If IP is going to become the new standard for everything in your home then home networking gerar needs to ramp up to meet the challenge with more redundancy and faster ways to get things back after a major piece of networking equipment fails.
 
Also much, much faster Internet options need to become available in the geographic majority that has 1 or 0 options for fast, low latency, high availability, uncapped  Internet today. 
 
upstatemike said:
My biggest concern with VOIP or any other IP based product is the "single point of failure" issue. If your router dies, your done. No phone, no TV, no automation (for some folks), and possible no access to music if you depend solely on streaming services. I recently purchased a second router to sit as a cold standby after my main router glitched and looked for a while like it wasn't ever going to boot again. Fortunately it dd but it really brought home how many things die without a router and how ugly it would be to configure a new one from scratch (over 200 dhcp reservations, etc.)
 
If IP is going to become the new standard for everything in your home then home networking gerar needs to ramp up to meet the challenge with more redundancy and faster ways to get things back after a major piece of networking equipment fails.
 
Also much, much faster Internet options need to become available in the geographic majority that has 1 or 0 options for fast, low latency, high availability, uncapped  Internet today. 
For sure. We have a solar PV system with backup batteries on key lights, TV, router, no HA or heavy loads. We have a NG dryer, stove etc.. When the Internet went out once in 12 years here, we still have mobile phones and  cable TV. Too many eggs in one basket is definitely a problem for IP based everything.
 
Sitting in the dark with no communications and no TV, using candles is not  good thing. We already had enough children.
 
Our household has been using VOIP service for about 8 years now. We use voip.ms and have no complaints; service is top-notch. We use the cheapest plan (pay as you go) and, based on our rather limited usage of it, it ends up costing about $11/month. VOIP interface is an Obihai Obi110 and we have several Panasonic cordless phones throughout the house;
 
The first router I used was ancient and simply couldn't handle the demand (phone calls were poor quality or simply failed). I replaced it with a consumer-grade Cisco router, replaced its firmware with Tomato, and all ran well for many years. Our Internet provider was the local cable company and, unlike the horror stories I've heard elsewhere, the service we received was excellent. A UPS provides the router and Obi110 (and some other gear) with about 90 minutes of runtime. We also have our cell phones should the power go out for an extended period of time (very rare but not impossible).
 
Last year we switched internet providers and now, for less money, we have Fiber To The Home (FTTH) with faster speeds and unlimited downloads for less money. Naturally, the old Cisco router had to be retired and replaced with the provider's router which supports FTTH. Wi-Fi coverage is better than the old device and VOIP service remains AOK.
 
FWIW, there are more phone features available on our voip.ms plan than I know what to do with. I think the few things I've used are call-blocking and caller-ID rename. For example, I renamed the pharmacist's CID to simply 'Pharmacy'. Our cordless phone can speak the incoming number and it does a far better job with pronouncing 'Pharmacy' than the actual pharmacy's name. Same thing was done for family members CID. Other features, such as IVR, will probably never be used. 
 
upstatemike said:
My biggest concern with VOIP or any other IP based product is the "single point of failure" issue. If your router dies, your done. No phone, no TV, no automation (for some folks), and possible no access to music if you depend solely on streaming services.
Absolutely.  So your "backup" is a device called a smartphone. Internet goes out, and you get bitten by a rattlesnake, then you use this cell phone. For my alarm monitoring, I only use cellular. Would never use Internet.
 
Now, lets think back to when you had a landline. No cell phone back then, so what happens if your landline goes out?  What was your backup then?
 
ano said:
Absolutely.  So your "backup" is a device called a smartphone. Internet goes out, and you get bitten by a rattlesnake, then you use this cell phone. For my alarm monitoring, I only use cellular. Would never use Internet.
 
Now, lets think back to when you had a landline. No cell phone back then, so what happens if your landline goes out?  What was your backup then?
My other landline.
 
When our kids where younger (before they had their own cell phones) we felt it very important to have a home phone service that they could always access.
 
That being said, the idea of paying $30-40 a month just to have a home phone wasn't going to fly either.  So I switched to an IP Phone system being run by a free software called Incredible PBX along with digital IP phones.  I originally only had one or two IP phones and used a Obi device to be able to use all of my old analog phones on the system.  Through the years I have replaced all of the analog phones with digital IP phones. 
 
We pay less than $4/mo for unlimited calling and e911 service. 
 
The biggest feature of the IP Phone system for our family isn't the home phone or voice mail service (because no one calls our home phone number except telemarketers). It's having an intercom feature built in.  We can dial other extensions and have instant two way communication via the speaker phone.  This is much better than the old intercom systems where you had to get up and press the button on the call box to speak. 
 
You can have different speeddials set on physical buttons on the phones.  So we have all of the  main rooms on individual buttons, but I also have call groups (like all of the kids rooms and play room on one number) so that it is super easy to call everyone to dinner, etc.  
 
sic0048 said:
sic0048, on 07 Nov 2019 - 13:06, said:

So we have all of the main rooms on individual buttons, but I also have call groups (like all of the kids rooms and play room on one number) so that it is super easy to call everyone to dinner, etc.
Just say "Alexia announce .........." and she does the same thing. Getting up and touching a phone seems so "last year." :eek:
 
sic0048 said:
sic0048, on 08 Nov 2019 - 11:13, said:
I'll take a button push to keep my privacy. Thanks.... ;)
ano said:
ano, on 07 Nov 2019 - 18:01, said:
Just say "Alexia announce .........." and she does the same thing. Getting up and touching a phone seems so "last year." :eek:
"Alexa, call echo device name" makes an intercom call. We have several kitchen echo, workshop echo, son's name echo, etc. Works pretty well. Only one has a screen/camera and that's in the kitchen (and has a stick-on slide cover for the camera). All have the drop-in feature disabled, so someone has to acknowledge the call.
 
I have an Echo 5 on the boat that's not setup that way so I can call it and see the salon area.  To access that I use "Alexa, drop in on boat echo show"

Privacy, well, I'll wager Amazon's use of the data is far less disrespectful than Google's. Amazon wants to sell stuff to you, Google wants to sell you to others.
 
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