Quote Originally Posted by mn shutterbug
Cell phones may be wireless, but see how good of a signal you get if a tower blows down. There are many people in rural areas that are are not within range of a cell tower. They would never dare go 100% wireless. Although there is a tower right in town where I live, I still would never trust wireless totally. About once a year there is a problem with a switch in the tower. Guess what? No service. Although I don't think I could live without my cell phone, landlines are still more reliable.
LOL! Towers falling down? Come on now, if that were even the least bit common people would be in an uproar! Yes, I've been in rural areas in Colorado and Kansas that have no wireless service. Fine, those people are stuck with a land line. But it's a lot cheaper to erect a cell tower than to run tens of miles of telephone cable out to the middle of nowhere and service the switch to serve the area. More and more, at least I believe this will happen, you'll see cell towers going up, not endless miles of copper.

I worked for US West (before Qwest bought them out) many years ago. Switches are a terrible weakness in the system, often overloaded. You have no idea how many times a switch dies and the calls have to be transferred to secondary lines on other switches, if that is even possible. In the Denver area, ESS switches and DMS-100 (I think I remember that right) were constantly being repaired. Land line calls get delayed or dropped more often than people realize. They put it down to having misdialed or not punching in all the numbers.

Here in a semi-rural county in Maryland, Verizon couldn't even get a reliable dial tone to my girlfriend's house. Even when they did, literally less than half the time, the line was so noisy as to be close to useless. Verizon never did find out what was wrong or how to fix the problem. More than half of everyone in her building went wireless by necessity (the others kept on suffering).

Once again, if you like land lines that's fine! Use what you like best, there is no absolute answer. The original statement I replied to was "[I] never saw any purpose for them [cell phones] worth the price." I pointed out that, for me and a growing number of others, "I no longer see any purpose for land lines worth the price." To each his own.

FWIW, most youngsters in my college classes do not know what a greenhouse is. In another decade or so, I bet the notion of a telephone attached to a wire will be treated as quaint history. We will see!