Earlier this year I purchased a Netgear Skype WiFi Phone, all in the hopes of abandoning my landline for good. Mostly because I'm nearly always reachable via instant messaging/email (friends joke I email so quickly, it might as well be called instant messaging), I had up till very recently lived without a cellphone [insert gasp here] for over three years after being an avid early adopter of the technology. I realized I hated being able to be reached everywhere and anywhere; turning off and tuning out is one of life's luxuries these days. But the Skype service has proven to be unreliable, so for now, as ridiculous as it seems, I have three different phones and three different services. With so many voice communication options these days, it got me wondering how many people out there are actually just like myself, juggling a myriad of devices, not completely satisfied with any of them. There seems plenty of people who have abandoned the traditional phones, and now only have a cell. Yet, there are a few friends I know who still just have a plain old analog landline (I believe these people were called "hermits", "witches" and "that weirdo at the ontop of the hill" in another time).
Andy & Andrew's Vintage Modern
Before & After: MacBook Dye Project
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Deep Mountain Maple...
How To Cook a Steak: 15 Recipes for a Weeknight Valentine's Meal
How To Cook a Steak in the Oven
Comments (8)
i answered "i've got a cell, but keep the landline..." although it's actually more like "i have a landline and keep a cell phone for emergencies."
i held out until last year. and i still hardly use the cell, but i am glad i have it when i need it.
The landline is for long conference calls, which is also why that phone isn't cordless. (It is possible, by the way, to have a 12-hour conference call. I wish I didn't know this.)
wende! you are so droll!
one wireless, one landline and only one of my two landline sets is cordless. In case of dire emergency, the old-fashioned corded landline is most likely to still be working.
After getting worse and worse service on my landline provided by "Sir Charge," I switched it to my cable company. I'd drop it altogether if I could find a cell phone that didn't make me feel like I was talking underwater.
Are you sure that the problems you had with skype weren't simply the handset you purchased? We've been using it as a home phone for over a year and have yet to have a problem. However, there are some really crappy phones for it out there.
Cyn
i use my cellphone but we live right behind all the tv/radio/cell towers and have crappy service. very very spotty and unreliable. i would assume it's because interference, but who am i to say - I'm a humanities major... In my old apartment I had both because of the same problem - just onthe other side of the all the towers - now I can't afford both cell and house phone - I'm hoping that once my cingular contract is up we'll get the tmobile hotspot thing. if it works, of course.
CFYG: The problems stem from Skype itself, as I was not correctly credited for my SkypeOut/Skype In account intially (I've got a dedicated assigned phone number also), and the drop in service occurs whether I was using the phone or the service via the computer. They actually argued for quite a while via emails, then quietly fixed my account without crediting me for the lost service. It's mostly better now, but it still occasionally drops out of service still to this day.
What really creates a buzzkill is that slight half second delay...but I've almost gotten used to it and just talk slower (I just imagine I'm describing how to calibrate an LCD monitor to my grandmother; that's about the right pace of speech to prevent me overrunning the conversation).