Is it time to ditch the landline?

Hmmm ...

Well, where I live the cell phone reception is cr*p.  Often no signal at all, and never more than 2 bars at best.  This is even in the village centre.  O2 quotes our village as "4G".  Big  joke.  Never even got 3G.  So, we'll keep the landline, thank you very much.

And we live in what has been called the largest village in Staffordshire - population 5000, so I would call it a small town!

Sorry to hear that Dungassin. Here on the Wirral we get good cell phone reception.

I haven't had a land line for about 7 years, and have had (Virgin) fibre broadband for the same period. I've been perfectly happy, and got a free upgrade from 50mbps to 70mbps a while back. That's just the basic, cheapest broadband-only service.

No experience of Virgin mobile, as I've always found a better package for my needs elsewhere.

If you have decent mobile signal and fibre available where you live, I can't see any reason to have a land line other than habit. It'd just be a waste of money on line rental to me.

Thanks Dave***T. That pretty much reflects my thinking but just wanted to get some views from the forum.

For me, where I live, mobile is expensive compared to landline, both for phone and data, so I minimise mobile use, also mobile signal is very poor in parts of my house - so landline rules ok. There is optical to a telecoms mini-exchange at the end of my road, just 100 yards or so away, but cable from there -from which I get a quite respectable speed of typically 70Mbps - though at times it can crash to a tenth of that or lower, presumably a factor of contention ratio.

We have a poor indoor mobile signal, but most UK providers now allow calls and messages to be routed over a WiFi network instead, and this works pretty well for me at home and elsewhere.

We are due to get fibre 'soon' but I'm not sure how easy it'll be to persuade the wife that we don't need a landline any more!

We ditched our landline in favour of Vonage, an internet phone. So our old wireless phone system connects to the Vonage box, we retain our old phone number, and pay eight quid a month, all calls to landlines free, no line charge. Small extra charge for calls to mobiles (I use my mobile on internet connection for those). Works an absolute treat.

tonym posted:

We ditched our landline in favour of Vonage, an internet phone. So our old wireless phone system connects to the Vonage box, we retain our old phone number, and pay eight quid a month, all calls to landlines free, no line charge. Small extra charge for calls to mobiles (I use my mobile on internet connection for those). Works an absolute treat.

I omitted to say that my telephone calls are VOIP and free, the landline simply being the compnnection for the internet.

We live in the middle of a modern UK housing development of over 4,000 homes with population of around 12,000, so you might reasonably expect that we would have excellent mobile reception.

It's a perfectly reasonable expectation.  But one that does not materialise in practice.  All the phone companies' base stations are located around the edges of the development and reach across to the centre.  However, there are so many buildings and trees in between our house and the base stations that the signal suffers from dreadful interference, especially when the wind blows and moves all the leaves that absorb or reflect the signal like chaff.  So we have typically 2 bars of signal reception (out of 5 bars) from all of the major networks but none of them are usable.

As I understand it, the 4G signal is only used for data traffic anyway, so voice quality depends on the GSM or 3G signals.

On the other hand, we are very fortunate to have Virgin fibre to the door, so broadband speeds are unbelievably fast, i.e. 200MB/second is available if you pay enough.  We don't understand how a home could need that much speed, so we suffer with a mere 162MB/s download speed, as measured from this computer at home.  Service has been excellent for many years now. We are happy Virgin customers.  So it has made sense for some time to route our mobile calls via the broadband connection.  

We tried using a Vodafone Suresignal.  It acts as a mini basestation for your Vodafone mobile phones, radiating a signal over a small range of 30-50 metres - ideal for one home.  It then routes the signal back via ethernet cable to your home broadband network. Please do not make our mistake and waste time & money on one of these awful contraptions.  We have had several years of inexplicable hell with a Suresignal.  The core of the problem is that the mobile phone keeps sniffing out the strongest radio signal and latching on to it, dropping its previous host.  For much of a call, the mobile is latched on to the Suresignal (showing 5 bars of reception), then it suddenly drops the Suresignal and latches on to the normal Vodafone network, at which point the call becomes garbled or is dropped completely.  And there is no way to stop this from happening.  After 15 calls to Vodafone technical support, they finally admitted this.  You have been warned.

Fortunately, there is a solution.  Modern smart phones are able to cope with wifi calling.  This ignores the dreaded Suresignal.  The phone latches on to your wifi router's wifi signal, so that you can make calls this way.  It has worked a treat for us ever since.

There, the summary of our 15 year saga of trying to get mobile phones to work in a 12,000 person residential development in the UK!  

Phew, that feels better.  I think I'll lie down now.  Hope this is of some use to at least some of you. 

Best regards, FT

Foot tapper posted:

We tried using a Vodafone Suresignal.  It acts as a mini basestation for your Vodafone mobile phones, radiating a signal over a small range of 30-50 metres - ideal for one home.  It then routes the signal back via ethernet cable to your home broadband network. Please do not make our mistake and waste time & money on one of these awful contraptions.  We have had several years of inexplicable hell with a Suresignal.  The core of the problem is that the mobile phone keeps sniffing out the strongest radio signal and latching on to it, dropping its previous host.  For much of a call, the mobile is latched on to the Suresignal (showing 5 bars of reception), then it suddenly drops the Suresignal and latches on to the normal Vodafone network, at which point the call becomes garbled or is dropped completely.  And there is no way to stop this from happening.  After 15 calls to Vodafone technical support, they finally admitted this.  You have been warned.

Fortunately, there is a solution.  Modern smart phones are able to cope with wifi calling.  This ignores the dreaded Suresignal.  The phone latches on to your wifi router's wifi signal, so that you can make calls this way.  It has worked a treat for us ever since.

 

Fortunately, this option is now obsolete, as all the major UK networks now have a WiFi calling option instead, as you have fortunately discovered! They have graciously decided to offer this service free of charge, although this seems like a bit of a cheek to me, as I have to allow them usage of my LAN and internet connection so that they don't have to provide me with their own network coverage. I might start billing them for the data usage....

Indeed Chris, yet only the latest handsets seem able to handle wifi calling.  For example, the iphone 6 can't, which came as something of a surprise to us.

We ended up trading in iphone 4S, 5 and 6 for three new ones, a 6S and two iphone SE handsets to ensure that we could all use wifi calling.  Given all the hassle that we had endured in the preceding years, Vodafone gave us a discount on the monthly rates for the new handsets, which was nice.

As you indicate, they also graciously agreed not to charge us for using Virgin's infrastructure!  Bless them.

But Virgin's broadband service has been frankly excellent for us.

Best regards, FT

Foot tapper posted:

Indeed Chris, yet only the latest handsets seem able to handle wifi calling.  For example, the iphone 6 can't, which came as something of a surprise to us.

 

Best regards, FT

That's a surprise to me too FT! My iPhone 6 does wi-fi calling perfectly well.

tonym posted:

Foot tapper posted:

Indeed Chris, yet only the latest handsets seem able to handle wifi calling.  For example, the iphone 6 can't, which came as something of a surprise to us.

 

Best regards, FT

That's a surprise to me too FT! My iPhone 6 does wi-fi calling perfectly well.

Same here, my iPhone 6 handles it no problem. I think Vodafone were the last network to offer a WiFi calling service, and all the providers do it a bit differently, so maybe it was just them?

ChrisSU posted:

tonym posted:

That's a surprise to me too FT! My iPhone 6 does wi-fi calling perfectly well.

Same here, my iPhone 6 handles it no problem. I think Vodafone were the last network to offer a WiFi calling service, and all the providers do it a bit differently, so maybe it was just them?

Tony, Chris,

Show offs!  You really don't know what you are missing with these new fangled, modern mobile providers.  You really need a dose of Vodafone.  They tell us that the next generation of Vodafone telephones will even work without a cable to connect them to the telephone plug board exchange. Fancy that!

Little wonder that Vodafone has just lost £6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (approximately)

We have Virgin cable at 70mbs, and two mobiles. The daughters also have mobiles. The landline was becoming less and less useful, so we ditched it last year. The only problem I've had was trying to register over t'internet for some service or other where they demanded a landline phone number; tried mobile number but that was not acceptable, so gave up and went elsewhere. Their loss.

Gave up Sky as well, and bought a free sat box. 

Foot tapper posted:

ChrisSU posted:

tonym posted:

That's a surprise to me too FT! My iPhone 6 does wi-fi calling perfectly well.

Same here, my iPhone 6 handles it no problem. I think Vodafone were the last network to offer a WiFi calling service, and all the providers do it a bit differently, so maybe it was just them?

Tony, Chris,

Show offs!  You really don't know what you are missing with these new fangled, modern mobile providers.  You really need a dose of Vodafone.  They tell us that the next generation of Vodafone telephones will even work without a cable to connect them to the telephone plug board exchange. Fancy that!

Little wonder that Vodafone has just lost £6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (approximately)

Vodafone ripped me off quite badly a couple of years back, so I don't care if they go bust. In fact, they can stick their phones where the sun don't shine as far as I'm concerned...with or without cables attached :0

pixies posted:

Prompted by the internet speed topic…I am considering a switch away from my long time broadband provider BT to Virgin.  This will give me access to their fibre technology as well as an opportunity to ditch my landline (and lose the BT line rental charge).  Our landline calls these days are mainly waster sales calls or the parents.  All of my family have reasonable mobile contracts and make all of our calls using mobile phones.

Has anyone else gone this route? Interested to hear pros and cons or any issues I may not be aware of?  Also experience of Virgin?  I will only use their hub as a means of getting broadband into the property, as I use Apple airport Extreme and a couple of Expresses to get Wi-Fi around the house.

 Thanks

Paul

Hi Paul, yes for many a 'land line' is specifically an internet connection... think a kind of Ethernet lead but over typically much longer distances.. and it's that the rental is for. Fibre accesses are an alternate, and so is broadband cable and satellite .. you simply pays your money and makes your choice for your particular location. Clearly there are also the increasingly popular bundle packages to consider with voice, broadband, PayTV and mobile which can be quite attractive and a simplified way of buying these services with good discounts. I use a 4way bundle from BT currently and it works for me. My only advice is that you have a reliable way of making emergency calls when there is no power to your house. Most traditional analogue voice lines are remotely powered and as such are a requirement for businesses in certain situations such as lift lines.. what's good for business to my mind should also be good for the home

Thanks for all the replies. Have spoken to BT and I am in contract till end July so no panic. I also have a couple of discounted mobile sim deals with them which I may lose if I switch. So bit more research before any decisions.

Regarding mobiles, my wife & I are on Tesco's £10/month sim-only tariff which gives us some free minutes, some free texts and 1GB data. For us, it works as we don't make too many calls, and don't stream much - occasionally my month's bill goes up to £12.............. I think the daughters on are the same.

In the family group we tend to communicate using WhatsApp

Obviously YMMV depending on your usage profile.

You do not need land-line phone if you have a good wifi at home and a smart phone, because the smart phone would detect a weak cellular signal and automatically switch to your wifi for voice communication.

tonym posted:

Foot tapper posted:

Indeed Chris, yet only the latest handsets seem able to handle wifi calling.  For example, the iphone 6 can't, which came as something of a surprise to us.

 

Best regards, FT

That's a surprise to me too FT! My iPhone 6 does wi-fi calling perfectly well.

Just checked my iPhone 6.  It doesn't do this, and the way to set it up as described on the Apple site doesn't exist in my phones settings..  I'm on O2.  So, I'll be keeping the landline.

My wife has an iPhone 6 and can make wifi calls through Whatsapp. This has proven useful when making 'free' overseas calls.

Clive B posted:

My wife has an iPhone 6 and can make wifi calls through Whatsapp. This has proven useful when making 'free' overseas calls.

Nice! Thanks for the tips.

Suzy Wong posted:

The only problem I've had was trying to register over t'internet for some service or other where they demanded a landline phone number; tried mobile number but that was not acceptable, so gave up and went elsewhere. 

Curiously this happened again this morning where a contact page would not accept my mobile number. Amusingly, the company is well-known to members of this forum as he does cables, servicing............and has pointy headgear!

Dungassin posted:

tonym posted:

That's a surprise to me too FT! My iPhone 6 does wi-fi calling perfectly well.

Just checked my iPhone 6.  It doesn't do this, and the way to set it up as described on the Apple site doesn't exist in my phones settings..  I'm on O2.  So, I'll be keeping the landline.

The iPhone 6 (onwards) does WiFi calling, but O2 doesn't offer WiFi calling.  O2 offer their separate TU app.