Blackcap Blog

Published at 19:38 on 27 May 2016

Well, I’ve done it. I now have a land line after a little over 10 years of being cell-phone only. Two things precipitated this decision:

1. About three years ago, I moved to Bainbridge Island. Once you leave the big city, cell coverage ceases to be so reliable. It was acceptable at the apartment I rented, but in my current home I get two bars of signal… at best. The missed and dropped calls at home eventually reached my breaking point.
2. Verizon is getting more and more intolerable. They don’t care about troubleshooting the issues I currently have. All they care about is trying to up-sell me to a smart phone, which I do not want. My cell service is less reliable than ever and I have no hope of any quick or easy resolution to that issue.

We’ll see how long this option lasts. Traditional analog twisted-pair landlines are slowly dying out, and that’s what I just got. Reason is that the electric power here is unreliable, and I don’t want a cable or IP phone that depends on some piece of equipment somewhere that in turn depends on commercial power. With plain old telephone service I can use a phone powered by the battery plant in the central office.

It would be a shame if I eventually had to settle for something less reliable, but it may come to that. It wouldn’t be the first time a less reliable new technology has eclipsed a more reliable older one. (Just think of all those fidgety electronic soap dispensers, faucets, and towel dispensers in public restrooms.)