I was going over our phone bill the other day, and considered for a moment what we were getting for our $50/month contribution to AT&T for our home phone service. I realized we were essentially paying for the benefit of a relentless onslaught of telemarketers and pollsters intruding on what precious little time I get to share with my family in the evening.
So, I decided to try a little experiment.
I’ve unplugged our wired phone and turned off all our cordless extensions around the house, turned off the ringer and speaker on the master unit and recorded the following greeting:
Due to the unprecedented call volumes of telemarketers and surveys, the Miller family is in the process of canceling our landline service and no longer accepting calls at this number. Please hang up and try calling the appropriate Miller family member on his or her mobile phone. Thank you for calling.
If this trial works out, then I’ll contact AT&T in about a month and have them disconnect our service.
So far, the experiment is working wonderfully. This entire weekend has been pleasant and peaceful, without the incessant din of the phone ringing to sell us credit cards, and refinancing, or trick us into thinking we have a long unpaid debt to some dentist in Tennessee (a state I’ve never even visited.) No more of those calls that I’d answer, several times a day, to utter silence for 15 seconds before the other end would disconnect.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords, but I wish they would stop dialing my home number when I’m eating dinner with my family.
And yes, I have signed up on the Do Not Call Registry, and politely ask each of these telemarketers not to call in the future.
My biggest concern with losing the landline is if we have an emergency during a power failure. That’s a non-zero risk, living in the Santa Cruz mountains, surrounded by redwoods, especially during winter storm season. But since most telecoms carriers are railroading their customers into IP-based phone service which uses a device in the home that relies on AC power—then landline reliability during a power failure isn’t much of a concern for them. Some units have a battery backup that provides a few hours of service. In a major storm, power may go out for more than a day.
We’ve got our mobile phones. In a pinch, I can get a small amount of AC power from our cars to power our broadband gateway and a laptop.
I’ve mentioned what we’re doing to friends and family, and the reaction has been consistently something like “What a wonderful idea, I should do that.”
I’m sorry AT&T.
If you need to get in touch with us, and you know us, it’s really not hard to do through other means. Even if you don’t have any of our mobile numbers. Our footprints are scattered across the internet.
Update – 12/05/2015: We decided to keep our landline. With El Niño on the way, no telling if we might lose power for a day or two here in the mountains. It’s also convenient that we have multiple phones around the house. Easier to grab than the mobile phone–if that’s ringing in a different corner of the house from where I am.
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