Cell Phone Saga

I read somewhere that 30% of telephone users in the U.S. have abandoned their land lines completely in favor of cell phones.

I'm pretty "tech savvy" for a guy my age, but I don't embrace new technology until I find either a specific need or an economic reason for doing so. That's why I did not even purchase a cell phone until a year ago. My reason was a need. I bought it primarily so Bonnie can reach me in an emergency when I'm not home. We also observed that public pay telephones have essentially disappeared, and we occasionally find ourselves wanting to call somebody when we are on the road.

The cost for my AT&T land line did not seem excessive at the time, so for the overlapping service I opted for the provider that appeared to be the cheapest (and to require the least commitment), that is, a TracFone. The service cost about $10.00 a month, and I did not expect to use the 400 minutes allocated for the one year of air time.

When Bonnie had to relinquish her company-provided cell phone, I bought her a TracFone as well. Her package includes "double minutes for life," so she has a budget of 800 minutes. At first this move seemed to be a mistake because her phone took two minutes or more just to acquire a signal. That proved to be a defect in the phone. TracFone replaced the phone and transferred both her number and minutes to a good one. Their technical support is a little less than perfect, and requires a little patience, but it is there.

It worked out so well, in fact, that when I purchased another year of air time for my phone, I also bought a "double minutes for life" ticket. I figure the time will cost between 12 cents and 15 cents per minute. It's the same, of course, for local and long distance calls, and there are no "access" or"roaming" charges. I am assuming that Bonnie and I both use all of our minutes, which may not be the case.

I have noticed that the monthly bill for our land line seems to have increased by almost 50% over the last couple of years. Just for fun, I figured out what my land line cost me last month. It worked out to almost 35 cents per minute for local calls. Long distance was even worse--since we only made two one-minute calls, long distance cost $3.84 per minute! Because we are relatively low volume users, we could probably tinker with the options and reduce those costs.

But it looks like I had an economic reason for trying cell phones all along, and did not realize it. For us the cost of the two cell phones is comparable to the cost of the single land line. Bonnie and I decided to make all of our long distance calls by cell phone. I plan to see if I can drop the long distance coverage on the land line altogether.

At this point, I am not even sure we want to hang on to the land line.

One thing that bothers me is that when a call is "cell-to-cell," both the caller and the receiver are charged for the time, which is not the case with land lines. So I will be paying for incoming calls as well as outgoing, and I have no data on what that cost will be. I guess I will just try to keep track for a few months and estimate the impact.

Of course, some sort of disaster could wipe out cell service altogether without affecting land line service. But that is not very likely. To keep the land line for that reason seems almost as "survivalistic" as buying a firearm or building a bomb shelter, and I don't do either of those things.

The day may not be far away when the statistic for "all cell, no land line" increases to 30% plus 2 people...