Landline for the Home

I have a landline for a couple reasons:
I like to have a central "home base" for school forms and stuff- so all the robo-calls from the elementary school come to the home line for us all to hear.
I like to be able to be on long phone calls around the house hands-free (I hate that I can't cradle a cell phone on my shoulder).
I like to be able to grab a phone in any room (I have like 4 cordless phones for my landline).
I want me and my kids to be able to call 911 quickly and easily at any time.

That last one was validated to me when my sister and her husband had a crazy crack addict show up at their door trying to get in. They called 911 from their cells and there were a lot of issues with that, like 911 being able to trace their location immediately, call them back, etc. She got a landline the next day. (in case you are wondering, the crazy person passed out on their doorstep before police even got there, but the 911 operater told them the police were at her door, so she opened it, and the passed-out crack addict who was leaning against the door fell into their home. Yeah, the police were not there yet. That part has nothing to do with the cell vs. landline issue, just thought you might enjoy that tidbit.)

The sales calls do get annoying though.

We still have a landline (no long distance) for a couple of reasons.

911 access. If a cell phone is dead and electricity out, I want a back up.

I don't want my cell phone ringing all the time when I'm away from home. The only ones who have my cell number are the people who would need to reach me in an emergency. Family, close friends, school. I always give businesses my landline number. I made the mistake of giving my cell phone number once. They sold my number and I started getting scam calls on my cell. Guess I think of my cell as my "unlisted" number.

We have one, and it's great for the kids. When kids are younger, it's kind of a pain for them to have to call a friend's mom or dad's cell phone to make arrangements to hang out, and I certainly wouldn't want to be taking calls for the kids on my phone all day. Also when kids get older and have their own phones (in my house that age is 13) the LL is good for when you take their phone away as a consequence for something.

We have a landline-- always have. It's not bundled; it's great if the wifi goes out and we have to rely on dial-up. And the reception is much better than a cell phone. We save money on our cell phones by doing a pay-as-you-go plan, about $10 for 3 months for each phone and only use them as needed. We rarely text. Just how we roll. Mine is basically a glorified clock.

It will also be nice when Kiddo is older-- and for us, this is our primary phone number. Sometimes our cell phones don't ring through, so this is actually most reliable as well.

We still have one. All of our family lives out of state, so we talk on the phone quite a bit. I'd much rather talk from my home phone--more comfortable. Plus, my cell phone is always dead!

We have one simply because it was in the bulk package we have with TV and Internet.

I have the ringer turned off because the ONLY calls that come to that line are solicitors. Everyone else knows to contact us on cell phones.

We are keeping this line because we do run our company from home and sometimes the line is used to send/receive a fax. We have a separate online fax service but I use this one to send the 1-3 faxes a month and I might receive a fax once every 3 months! So for us, we opt to keep it. The savings does not outweigh the benefit.

I shock a lot of people when I say, I don't own a cell phone. I do have a landline, which does have better reception than cell phones. But the main reason I don't have a cell phone, is there isn't a need for it. I'm not going to pay for something I don't need. Cell phone bills can be so expensive. If I'm not at home, then I'm at work, or at my mother's house, all have a phone where I can be reached. People who I need to talk to, know where to find me. My land line is a package deal too, but really, I don't need one. My kids, 19 and 17 have a cell phone that their grandparents gave them, and know they pay their bill. The only time I've seen the need is in an emergency, car problems or picking up kids.
So, yes, I do feel the need for a landline.

We have cell phones but we do use our land line quite a bit.
My Mom hears me better over a land line - she has trouble hearing me if I'm on a cell phone - same goes for conference calls.
I like my cell phone for texts and personal messages.calls with family (except my Mom) - all the junk calls and official school calls come to the house.

Our "main" phone is our land line. It's much more reliable during an extended power outage – our rural location gets occasional outages that last longer than a day or two, and since I use my cheap cell phone only occasionally for long-distance calls, the power isn't always topped off, and the reception is not nearly as good.

We spend less than $14 monthly for both my husb's cell and mine, and our land line is about $20. All together, we spend less than a dollar a day total (plus about that much again for high-speed internet). Seems like such a bargain after hearing how much many families pay for their cell services only.

It is just my husband and I at this point, and we cancelled our land line several years ago.

We don't really miss it... we each have a cell phone.

If we had younger kids, we might still want it for the ease of monitoring who and when friends called.

No plans to eliminate the land line here.
I hate talking for any length of time on a cell. Blech.

We have one for 911/emergency purposes. Sometimes cell towers lose power in storms and a landline (esp. a corded) phone can be your only means to call out. We also signed up for something called no mo robo and it has cut down greatly on unsolicited calls. I use the landline probably as often as my cell phone.

We gave up our landline 2 years ago. We haven't missed it at all.

We switched our landline to a cell phone so we could keep the number but sometimes I do miss the landline. If a cell phone is in another room or whatever-you just don't hear it. A landline rings everywhere and is easier to hear on as well.
To me it wasn't worth the cost with paying for long distance as ours was a separate charge and even though we hardly ever used it, they had a minimum-it was a rip off. Oh well.

We gave ours up this year and never missed it. It's so quiet now! No sales calls for replacement windows or lawn services, no bogus or even legitimate charities, no political robo-calls, no wrong numbers even.

However, until the kids are old enough to have their own cell phones (which I don't believe in for 8 and 10 year olds even though I know a lot of people do), I think you are absolutely right that you have to stay on top of their social lives and who's calling and texting them. I also think it teaches kids a certain amount of phone etiquette if they have to talk to parents who answer. So that would be my only hesitation in your case.

We do have 2 business land lines though so we have a way of getting the reverse 911 calls that come about twice a year. Someone below mentioned that cell phone towers can go out sometimes - it's the opposite of course of lines going down. We've lived through both types of disasters in the last few years here in Massachusetts. We had the Irene and Sandy disasters, losing land lines for 3 and 5 days (the wires looked like strands of spaghetti, they were such a mess). So cell phones were essential (and we had to drive to places with power to recharge when we had no power for days). But we also had the Boston Marathon bombing - my son was a block away from the first explosion and I reached him immediately on his cell but soon lost contact. The only way we could stay in touch was via Facebook! The spectators had no idea what was going on, but I watched the TV coverage (which was good because so many local stations were covering the event anyway), then put on FB what they were saying and told my son which way to walk to get away from the area. Using his phone as a computer to access FB was critical.

So there are pros and cons to both services.

A land line is the only phone I have. My husband and I don't have cell phones, and my kids won't have cell phones until they have jobs and can pay for them. I don't find cell phones to be necessary, and they are pretty expensive if you need on for each member of the family! A couple of my kids friends families have gone to having cell phones only and it is a huge pain in the butt. If my son wants to call his friend he first has to try moms cell, then dads cell. I also hate talking to people on cell phones. When people call me on a cell I tell them to call me when they get home. I can't stand the static and background noise on a cell.

We got our land line back. Sometimes cells are down for one reason or another. What if you had an earthquake and some towers were damaged but land lines still worked? Or a hurricane? A huge power outage where your cell phone couldn't be charged for days and days? A storm surge could take out a large chunk of services that effect people, even those that live inland. We have a hard wired phone base that has a cord then we have 2 portable handsets.

Cell towers are usually okay but what if???

I wanted a concrete way to call for help if we need it.

I realized at one point we had not used our land line in 3 years. I also realized we no longer even had a phone. But it had been so inexpensive with our cable, I had kept it. But once the price went up, I cut it off and it saves a nice amount of money a year. Never looked back.

It took us a while to finally decide to dump it. Basically, for everyone in our household to have their own cell phone, so that there was never a person home with no way to call police, fire/rescue, etc.

If you have a reliable internet connection (we have DSL) you can do what we did, and buy an Ooma device and set up your Ooma account to port your old home telephone number over. Now we still have our same home phone number as we've always had, but it comes through VoIP for the price of taxes (just under $4/month) alone. It is connect thru the DSL modem and since we have a base phone unit (with multiple hand sets) we still can answer the phone all over the house as if nothing at all has changed. Except NOW, we can do all sorts of things with the incoming calls. I haven't gotten one solicitation on the line since we've had the service (unless you count about 4 ObamaCare robo-calls that came in over a 24 hour period--and I went online, clicked on the calls and added them to the "blocked" list... no more calls from them since).
I can see every call coming into my home on this number, and every call going out, how long they were, and I can program certain numbers to ring in specific ways, or to be forwarded, or to go directly to voice mail, or for the phones to not ring when my husband is sleeping for shift work, or or or... There are a zillion ways I can control how our phone rings. I can even have the calls forwarded to my cell phone if I want when I know I won't be at home.
We opted for the upgraded service (which is an additional $9.99 month), but you don't have to. Either way, it still saves us over what we were paying before. My home answering machine still picks up. But if I want, I can set my Ooma account voice mail to pick up before the machine does, and then I can even set it to send me the message in a text to my cell phone.

Nobody even needs to know that it isn't a landline, really. Your kids' friends can still call your house and you can still pick up and hand the phone over to your kids. The only issues are if you have iffy internet service. Our internet service is fairly solid most of the time. It seems like about twice a year we go through a multi-day period where it glitches and we have connection issues, but otherwise we're good. For a lot less money.

http://ooma.com/products

We don't have one. We both have cell phones and throwaway in case of emergency (like if the power is out and there is a dead battery on my cell phone, which happened to me in a snowstorm long ago).

Because the cell phones are smart phones, even if the wi-fi goes down in the house, they will connect via 4G LTE.

Unless you have bad cell reception, I wouldn't bother.

We have a land line and have no plans to get rid of it. We have one phone plugged into the wall that isn't cordless as well. A couple years ago there was an accident at a power plant that supplies power to all of San Diego. I mean literally pretty much from the border all the way up to Orange County and from the ocean to the Arizona border and I think even some of Arizona was affected. Cell towers either went down or were completely sketchy when they were working. There was no internet because you needed power for the modem to work. The land line continued to work though.
I use my land line every single day. Cell phone minutes are expensive! I would never want to hand my cell phone to one of my kids to wander around the house and talk to Grandma like they do with the landline.
My brother tried getting rid of their land line. It didn't last.

We have a landline. My husband has a cell phone through his job, but the kids and I don't have cells.

Our usual phone is cordless, but we also have a corded phone in the basement so I can make calls even when there is no power. Usually, my first call is to the utilities company to find out when the power is supposed to be up. :-)

I am a big proponent of having a landline. I like my kids friends to call the landline so i get a sense of who they are, their manners and know who they are talking to. Also for emergencies...i turn my cell phone off at night and like having my home phone for other people to call in case I did not set them ip in my mobile..ie hospitals, police, other parents or family members not calling from their phone.

Haven't had a landline in like 6 or 7 years...don't miss it a bit. I found it instrusive and a waste even back then. I kept it for a few years after we were using cells for everything for the alarm system but now you don't even need a landline for one of those.

Kids rarely talk on the phone anymore they text or whatever the newest app is so you're missing out on most of it anyhow.