Why am I paying AT&T for a land line?

I noticed during our recent visit to southern Arizona that none – absolutely none – of our frequent telephone communications with each other and other members of the wedding party and family involved the use of a land telephone line.

It was all cell phone. In fact, I don’t believe Morgan and Andrew have a land line at their home.

Morgan hasn’t bothered with a land line for years in the various apartments she had in Bloomington, Ind.

I went looking for data on this trend away from land lines in favor of cellular and found the Federal Communications Commission report Trends in Telephone Service, 2008, which is apparently the most recent data published by the FCC. Among other things, it showed growth in the number of land lines stopped in the early part of this decade and the number of land lines actually decreased by more than 20 percent by 2006.

This graph shows monthly personal expenditures for cell service eclipsed wired service in 2006. It also shows that the cost of wired telephone service peaked in 1999 and 2000 and has been in decline ever since. At the same time, the cell expenditures have steadily increased. It will be interesting to see if they ever reach the 1999-2000 wired level. My guess is that they will due to the proliferation of 3G and 4G wireless data services and the effects of inflation.

Which brings me to the reason for this discussion: I paid our AT&T phone bill this morning and wonder what I got for my $70. We had several calls to relatives in other states, but we also had to put up with several calls urging us to vote for various candidates in the Arkansas Democrat primary, other solicitations, calls for the people who previously had our number and other wrong numbers.

We get our Internet from our cable TV company, so the AT&T land line is irrelevant to our online lives. And our AT&T line can’t do text messages or share photos, or compete with Skype for video conversations, or follow us around in any meaningful way. Our home phone number is unlisted, so we don’t have it just to be in the phone book.

I’ve had this conversation with Maria a couple of times and she’s not ready to dump the land line and go completely cellular. One argument on her side involves the inability of some 911 emergency systems to display the caller’s exact location and the uncertainty that a 911 cell call will go to the right emergency responders. But those problems are being addressed by the cellular community and will doubtless be resolved soon.

Cellular lines can be overwhelmed in times of crisis, but then our AT&T land line was out for several days during the ice storm of 2008.

We’re not quite ready to make the jump, but the day is coming when we’ll pull the plug on AT&T and find something else to do with the $800+ we pay them every year.