Although both my wife and I have cell phones, we also have a conventional AT&T land line in our home. POTS.
There are any number of good reasons for this. For one, the phone company maintains its own power system and, if you have an old-fashioned dial handset (we do), you can generally make calls on it even during a power outage and when cell phone service has been lost.
This week we began to get complaints from friends calling us on the house phone that our line was always busy. On Thursday we noticed that we had lost dial tone. When we called our house phone from our cells, we got a message saying that the line was busy.
I called AT&T. Hacking my way through the underbrush of AT&T’s voice response system, like Stanley seeking Livingston, I finally reported the outage. The system performed an automated test, found nothing, and asked me to test my phone and call back if I still had a problem without offering me an alternative to schedule service. I had already tested my phone, demonstrating with pretty fair confidence that the problem wasn’t inside the house, and the automated test hadn’t changed anything. I called back and this time was allowed to speak to an actual human support representative. The support representative told me that a service call had been scheduled for the next day afternoon.
The afternoon came and went. Still no dial tone.
I called the support line again. Got a support representative again. This support representative told me she had no record of a previously scheduled service call and told me I could expect a service call some time on Monday. I asked for a written confirmation of that. That flustered her. Apparently, it was off-script. She asked if I wanted to talk to a supervisor. I did. After waiting on hold for about ten minutes, I was told that a supervisor would call me back. Click.
An hour later I received a call from someone identifying herself as an AT&T support supervisor. I repeated the whole rigmarole again. She gave me the URL of a site where I could check the status of my service call, something not apparent from AT&T’s outwards-facing web site. Click.
The next morning (Saturday) at around 9:00am I received a call on my cell, the contact number I had given AT&T. The person on the other end identified himself as an AT&T support technician and said he was about twenty minutes away. Five minutes later he arrived. He checked the line connection box (the Network Interface Device) on the exterior of the house. No problem there. He systematically checked the line backwards from the NID to the pole and from the pole to the phone company’s local switches.
After about an hour he returned, said he’d fixed a few things, gave me his office telephone number (he acknowledged that calling AT&T Customer Care was at best frustrating and at worst useless), and left.
So far, so good. After about 30 hours we’ve still got a dial tone. If I had the inclination in a couple of hours I could jerry-rig a system to verify more-or-less continuous service. I don’t have the inclination. We’ll see.
If AT&T stopped offering landline service tomorrow, I’d be sad. When AT&T continues to bill me for service they’re not providing, it makes me angry. I’m not paying them for intermittent service. I’m paying them for reliability. No reliability—no landline and, make no mistake, they’d lose my business.
My prospective conclusion from all of this is that AT&T doesn’t really care about landline service any more.
I agree with you about the reliability of the landline, but AT&T has probably made a decision to cut back on servicing the landlines. They can coast on their reputation, and save a lot of money. With cell phones becoming the primary telephone for many people, the landline service has probably stopped growing, or the rate of growth has slowed considerably.
The service will need to get really bad for me to switch, and AT&T knows it. I am sure that many of the other landline users are the same. If they lose one landline customer, they can replace them with two or more. A house will have one landline, but it will have multiple cell phones.
I suspect that cell phone data and text services are far more lucrative than POTS.
From this morning’s paper:
“Lawmakers in Illinois are faced with deciding the issue as part of a rewrite of the state telecommunications law scheduled to expire June 30. On one side, the state’s largest business groups and AT&T argue it is time to end a requirement that phone companies offer minimal landline service at minimal cost.”
http://www.sj-r.com/top-stories/x609794531/Fewer-landline-phones-create-challenge-for-lawmakers
The article makes some points, the lines are aging, the rate probably assumed greater usage, a cheap wireless w/backup might be more cost-efficient, and parts are becoming hart to obtain. But an alternative could be for AT&T to sell off this sector. I suspect that AT&T is obtaining an indirect benefit from this tail of the market and/or fears a competitor might better leverage the business than AT&T has.
Worldwide the number of cell phones exceeded the number of landlines in 2002. The number of landlines actually peaked in 2006 and since then has declined slightly.
I continue to believe that, if you’re going to have a home phone in addition to your cell, it should be a conventional landline. I am, apparently, in the minority.
I can’t help but suspect that phasing out landlines will backfire on AT&T. The more people depend exclusively on cells, the more political pressure there will be to trim their fees.
I finally ditched the landline when I moved back to Florida. I occasionally consider going back simply as an emergency backup, especially since cell numbers are now portable. We did that in Ohio, but we got weekly calls for three straight years from collection services looking for some guy. Apparently they re-use landline numbers, so that’s a pretty big disincentive for me.
Andy, in 2004 we got three hurricanes in six weeks in Central Florida. We never lost our land line, even when everything else went down. I’m really REALLY reluctant to give mine up after that. Especially since the number we’ve got now has been in the family since 1960, so we don’t have the recycling problem.
Ice, we were required to keep a land line at the coast as a condition of rental with agencies in Alabama.
I keep one here.
Hey Janis. I saw your comment over at RL.
We have to keep a landline, my Semaphore is rusty.
Good lord, man, why haven’t you switched to Aldis lamps?!
Completely OT, but maybe not.
Ice, as I’ve said here before, I spent a large part of my life as an editor. When I was working in-house, we made extensive use of freelancers. In fact, most non-trade publishing now involves freelance editors almost exclusively. I was wondering if you’ve ever thought of editing math books. You write well, and seems to be a lot of opportunities for someone to freelance in that field. Google, ‘freelance math editor’. You’ll never get rich, but it can be a steady source of income.
What a good idea, sam. I hope Ice at least looks into the suggestion.
My wife has been encouraging me to “think outside the box”. For me the problem with that is that I’ve never really felt a calling to do anything in particular. I like doing lots of things and I’m good at practically anything I apply myself to. My problem in life hasn’t so much been one of following my bliss as finding it.
My problem in life hasn’t so much been one of following my bliss as finding it.
Who says it should be one thing? You seem to enjoy being a jack-of-all-trades, so I think you’ve found it.
As for the freelance editor work – interesting. I’ll have to look into that. A friend of mine is a freelance editor for science mags, among other things. I’ll check with her, too.
And thanks for the suggestion, sam. Despite my friend’s line of work I had never considered that.