Holy cow, it's been nearly 11 months since we canceled our landline service. Don't miss it a bit.
This post is for all of you who are tired of the tech talk required to change the way you use your phone. I'm not going to dazzle anyone with engineering updates on what we're doing now because... we haven't changed anything. (Besides, we have Daley for dazzling tech updates.) This post is mainly about how apathy and laziness can rule your telcom decisions.
A brief recap:
- We ditched our Hawaiian Telcom DSL and landline service, which cost roughly $60/month.
- We added RoadRunner to our Oceanic Cable "Standard" analog subscription, which added roughly $9/month to that bill.
- We bought a DOCSIS3 cable modem, the Motorola Surfboard SB6141, for $90.
Today's running expenses are down at the bottom of this post.
Cable ISP has worked a lot better than Hawaiian Telcom's corroded copper. Whenever service slows down at our house, it's inevitably been Oceanic Time-Warner Cable or a Mainland problem-- and ever since we fixed a water leak in the street box, it's been just 2-3 times in the last couple years. The modem has bright blue lights that blink annoyingly, so we've tucked it away in the cupboard that houses our desktop tower. Otherwise it's performed flawlessly, quietly, and invisibly.
My spouse and I have both spent our careers in the military, and our duty days go back to the old-school times when you carried the duty VHF radio so that people could reach out and touch you (even in the bathroom). Later we were "upgraded" to pagers and eventually to cell phones. During those decades we both learned that when the telcom electronics fired up, you were going to be miserable and working. When we retired and our landline phone rang, it was usually more of the same (or a robocall). This negative association with phone ringers means that we really dislike getting phone calls.
That may be our personal problem, but it means that we prefer to use our phone for outgoing calls. If someone wants to contact us they usually end up leaving voicemail or sending an e-mail. We like that.
Over three years ago my spouse was traveling with a volunteer group a couple times a year, and for that week the ladies would have trouble letting her know about last-minute changes to meetings & carpools. She finally bought a pay-as-you-go LG VX5600 clamshell from Wal-Mart: $24. It's preconfigured with Verizon service, and it's extremely basic. It won't even back up its data to a PC, although Verizon would happily do so to their servers for a small monthly fee. As one tech said, "This is just a gateway drug to get you to upgrade to a real phone." When my Dad had emergency surgery in early 2011, I bought the same phone (on my way to the airport). The phone did a great job for two weeks of helping me get Dad out of the hospital and into an Alzheimer's care facility, but it just reinforced my negative association with ringtones. When I got back home, I shut the phone off and put it in my desk drawer.
When we canceled our landline service last October, we started using my cell phone again. We simply abandoned our landline number instead of porting it, which has eliminated a lot of annoying phone calls from the last 15+ years. We've just updated our profiles with our financial companies and let people know our cell phone number when they asked for it.
The cell phone requires $15 every 90 days or your account is closed. I add $15/month via autopay. (Spouse has even let her account lapse, so her phone is just a 911 brick.) The first call of the day is expensive-- $1.99-- but the rest of the day's calls are free. I think texts are a dime, but we only get 3-4 of those per year. Verizon also has cheaper by-the-minute plans, and I should probably look into that. For now, though, we don't have to think about how we're using the phone. Some months we'll spend $40 on calls, other months we barely use the $15.
We leave the phone sitting on the counter. It almost never leaves the house, because neither one of us cares enough to want to carry it. It hardly ever rings. We rarely answer it. We leave the default ringer shut off 24/7 unless we're expecting a callback. I try to remember to check the phone for calls every few days, but I really don't care. (My spouse cares even less-- it's that negative association kicking in.) We have three "important" numbers set up to ring through whenever the phone is turned on-- our daughter, my brother (Dad's guardian), and our tenant. They all back up their voicemails with e-mails. We added a fourth ringtone for a neighbor who will never learn to use e-mail, and who has the extremely annoying habit of walking down to our house and ringing our doorbell if we don't pick up on the cell phone.
95% of our electronic contact is by asynchronous e-mail and social media. Maybe 99%. That rarely, if ever, interrupts us.
Last year, during a Bangkok vacation, we bought a $10 Bluetooth speaker pod with a tiny mic. When our daughter calls our cell phone number, I spend 15 seconds turning on the pod and synching it so that we can all chat on the line together. It works great. Our conversations last for 45-90 minutes, but she's the only one who talks with us for that long. On her ship (based in Rota, Spain) she either has to call from a government line (which has a lot of limits) or use Skype (which we do with our iPad or PC). Now that she's finished college her calls have dwindled to monthly, and when she deploys they'll probably be quarterly. We keep in touch via e-mail and Facebook, and we're all happy.
To summarize our expenses, we spent $24 + $90 + $10 = $124 to go from landline (and DSL) to cell phone (and cable Internet). Our monthly expenses have dropped by -$60 + $9 +$15 = -$36/month. We paid back the capital expense within four months, although some months we add $15-$20 in additional cell phone minutes. Maybe we'll save a little more by going from $1.99/day unlimited calls to paying per minute, but apathy and laziness have caused significant procrastination on that research project.
Best of all, we finally feel as if we're free of the phone. Maybe someday our negative association will fade away, but not yet.
Could we do better? Sure, we could buy a smartphone and go with a cheap cell/WiFi provider. We could buy a VOIP box for our house line (fed from the Internet) and forward its calls to the cell phone. Refer back to my comments on apathy and laziness.
On the few days that I actually carry a cell phone, our clamshell fits my pocket a lot better than a smartphone. Maybe I'll be motivated to make more changes when a smartphone can truly replace my wallet-- right down to the military ID, driver's license, and library card.