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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

The mind blowing fact is people still pay for long distance calls on landlines and it's not cheap.

Free internet calls have not only existed for years but you can even get free cell service these days with services like ringplus.

So landlines are the new AOL users (and probably a huge intersection at that).

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Land line user here. Don't get cell service at my house, the WISP we use for internet is usually fine but occasionally unreliable. Also, a couple years ago we lost power for almost a week. So I think there is still a good reason for some people to keep a land line for backup/emergency purposes.

Agree completely, though that's different than using it for routine long distance calls

My parents still have a landline for largely the same reason. Cell phone only works in certain spots in the house and their DSL requires a land line / isn't reliable enough for VoIP anyway. One second they'll be buzzing along the next will be an hour of 56k-esq speeds.

That's an interesting, yet opposite, correlation from the article.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/15/8965409/us-internet-access...

Of course it could mean that people living in broadband poor regions with poor cell service are the new 'unreachables'. They don't have reliable land lines, and their cell service is spotty. This in itself is a worrying theory as people with times of service unavailability are much more likely to remain in poverty, many types of jobs poorer people work have on demand scheduling where their hours are changed commonly. Being unreachable they may quickly find themselves fired.

We had a land line for a while as it actually LOWERED our overall bill with Comcast, but we only ever had the fax machine plugged into it or used it to call our missing cell phones. The problem I see about the emergency backup situation is that if we lost power for more than a few hours, our phone wouldn't work either because the battery backup would eventually die in the modem. The same was true of our old FiOS install at the last place (though the battery was much larger and not in the modem, at the fiber junction). So if you don't have an old copper phone line that doesn't need power from your house, what's the point of even having a landline 'in case of emergency'?

Seems to me you're describing VoIP, not a landline. It also seems that the definition has shifted. So is landline still POTS, or does VoIP from your cable provider count?

Don't telcos also do this? IIRC Verizon's voice service is over FTTx/VOIP

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