Sure, there are a lot of folks out there who need landlines because they live outside of normal mobile coverage areas. The number is probably in the millions, since just 1% of the United States is equivalent to 3M people. In my personal experience here in Southern California, though, I’ve had very little desire to have a landline telephone. Here’s why.
I wanted an extra phone number to have in case my main cell died or got lost. I didn’t even need it to be mobile, I just wanted the number to be accessible. I looked high and low and found that not only was a landline more expensive, it generally didn’t even include any kind of long distance without additional fees. We may not have the best mobile phone industry in the world, but for my use, it’s cheaper than copper. I have ATT for my iPhone, but I use T-Mobile for their awesome prepaid service (awesome excepting the fact that they don’t have any means of using EDGE data.)
So when the woman and I called Cox to move our cable service, they asked us about getting 6 months of free digital telephone service, I declined. He asked if we wanted to save money, and I told him that it would not be saving me money since after 6 months I would be paying for a service I don’t have or need now. He seemed a little befuddled, but at least he didn’t push the issue. I can only imagine what ATT does with it’s landline voice subscribers. I would consider naked DSL service if the speeds were competitive with Cox’s cable internets, but alas, DSL sucks donkey balls and getting ATT to give you naked DSL would require another round with the donkey (with non-guaranteed results.)
The only thing I can think of for using a landline is a physical fax machine. I might keep one around if I needed it, but I have no use for such a contraption, and I wouldn’t tolerate it anyways because of all the damn fax spam I see in other peoples’ trash. If I did need faxing, I’d probably just use OS X’s built in fax server option and have them all PDFd for me. Or use eFax. I dunno, I haven’t thought about it that much to be honest with you.
I love my cheap, accessible cell service. If I need to make international calls, I guess I can use SkypeOut, but I don’t need to talk with anyone outside of the states right now, so who cares? Not me.