Landlines
(with apologies for recent lack of posts)

This past Thanksgiving I visited my parents in their new (or very old, depending on how you look at it) house in Washington DC. I was chilling by the fire one evening, enjoying a book and James Bond flick when I heard a phone ring.

My cellphone is always on vibrate (a subject for another post), so I proceeded to search for the offending cellphone that someone inconsiderately must have left out to disturb my reading. And to my dismay I discovered not a cellphone, but a regular phone. A landline phone. It was so foreign, I almost did not know what to do with it. Let's be honest: the age of the landline phone is over. The age of the cellphone/ipod/blackberry is here. Landline phones are dead. The only reason to have a landline at all would be to use it in order to get internet connectivity, or if you live in a place with horrible cellphone reception.

A landline phone service will run you, for a decent plan including long distance (meaning within the US, but outside your zip code), almost as much as a cellphone plan will cost you. Yes, the cellphone will probably be about $10 more a month depending on circumstances, but the added benefit of having a your phone be portable is well worth it. In fact, in most developed countries it's expected that you would have a cellphone, so that it's almost a necessary part of participation in society (odd and somewhat tragic as that may seem). Most companies, for example, will insist that all it's employees have cellphones so they can be reached in an emergency. Also, the cellphone industry is super competitive, which should drive prices down much further in the next few years, to the point where there will be no financial benefit whatsoever to have a landline. And at the rate that they're putting up cellphone towers across the nation, reception in all but the most remote places will not be an issue either.

Add to all of this the emergence of VoIP, with such products as Skype and Google Talk, and you can really see the death of the landline phone. With these products you can talk over your internet connection, to anyone else with an internet connection - anywhere else in the world - for free. Talk about competition.

So get rid of your landline phones. It's over. Finis. And say hello to the next stage in telecommunications: free wireless internet everwhere, and mobile devices that can access that internet, and through use of VoIP talk to each other for free in unlimited amounts. All paid for by ads. Cellphone companies might even be paying you to use their service in 10 years. Now that's a sweet thought.