Cutting the Telephone Line

Deep down, I still have the mental framework that a telephone is supposed to be connected to the world via a twisted pair of wires that goes to a central switch somewhere in a big hulking exchange building. It’s an old and outdated view of the telephony world, but for most of my life, this way of thinking prompted me to always have a landline in my home. In fact, the idea of not having a landline was almost too strange to consider.

Suddenly, that’s changed. It’s not the fact that I’ve had a mobile phone for a bit over a decade now. I’m quite sure that I’d be perfectly comfortable with the idea that a mobile phone is for when I’m out of the house and a land line is for when I’m in the house if things had been different the last few years. I am, after all, well on my way to 40 and definitely not part of the generation currently in college that laughs at landlines as historic and quaint.

What happened, however, is that I quite recently realized that I don’t recall using my landline once in over two years. It might have happened, but I can’t remember a single occurrence. The reason is that I’ve forwarded off the calls that come in on my landline to my mobile line because I travel so much for work. And, not once in two years did I disable that forwarding.

That realization was kind of a surprise. It was soon followed by another realization. My fax line, a second landline on my service plan, is only used by one client. And, I hate faxes anyway. This lead me to think about how much I was paying for my land line service, about $75 per month all told with voice mail and all the other things I no longer use. Sure, I could economize that a bit by shaving a few features off the dual-line plan I’ve got, but then the next thought came into my mind. A single question: “Why? Why should I keep the land line?”

The best thought I could come up with is that the telephone line supports my bandwidth to the world via Speakeasy DSL. I’ve long been a fan of Speakeasy and have been a customer since 2000 or so. They’ve had great service and my experience with cable and other solutions before that was so abysmal I never wanted to go back. The thing about Speakeasy’s service, however, is that it’s not cheap. The plan I had for the best bandwidth I could get through them into my house runs around of $125 per month. It’s always been a point of pain, but the bandwidth was always good. Good enough that I could just barely justify it as a business expense.

If it’s the only reason I’m really keeping a land line, however, it’s not $125 per month. It’s actually $200 per month. Is it worth $200 per month? $2400 per year? Really? Is that justifiable?

So I set out to find out. I went down to Fry’s and picked up a cable modem and fired up an account with Comcast with the intention that I’d cancel it quickly if it didn’t work out. I’m not a fan of their business practices and I’ve never been a fan of bandwidth caps, even 250GB/month ones. But, the purpose of my experiment was to find out if the service was solid enough and fast enough for me to consider. So I hooked up the modem, connected a laptop, and set up an account entirely online. I didn’t even have to speak to a customer service rep or wait. All it took was filling out a few forms and I was off to the races.

After setting things up, I ran a bunch of speed tests to see if the line performed acceptably well. The answer to that was an unqualified, “Oh heck yeah!". I even ran speed tests against a variety of Speakeasy’s test servers and came up with some great numbers, as shown to the right. Numbers that crushed those I could get on my 6Mb down/768Kb up DSL line. Numbers that far exceed the 12Mbit plan I signed up for. I guess that would be PowerBoost™ in action.

Now, it’s almost certainly the case that these numbers turned out so well because I live in a new building with great wiring and Comcast probably has put a fiber line into the basement equipment room. That’s fine. I’ll take those numbers and be happy about the circumstances under which I find them. Additionally, I have no expectation that Comcast’s customer service will be great like Speakeasy’s has been. In fact, I'm sure that it won’t be. Though, I am encouraged by the fact that setting the connection just worked with no human intervention needed.

The cold hard math shows that by canceling my Speakeasy account, killing my landlines, using Comcast for Internet access, and by picking up an online fax service for my one client that uses faxes, I can net out a savings of around $1800 per year. With the economy the way it is, this is a pretty easy cost cutting measure to take and will make looking at 2009 just a bit easier. Sure, I could take half steps. I could just kill off the fax line and remove all the extras from the main line. I could even go to Speakeasy’s DSL that doesn’t require an existing voice line to piggy back onto.

Once the numbers have been looked it, however, it makes more sense to just go all the way. Of course, if $2400 per year was the only way to have decent access to the Internet, it’d be a different story. But it doesn’t need to cost that much anymore. So I’m cutting the twisted pair lines. Because, you know, they are historic and quaint. Sure, a land line still sounds better than most mobile phone calls, but 3G calls are getting there in terms of clarity and on a good day sound as good to me as a land line. In a few years, they'll be even better.

I have to admit, however, that I am just a wee bit worried about using Comcast. I still remember how bad cable access can be. My fingers are crossed.