We prefer to keep a landline simply because cell phone connections are erratic and unreliable in our area, and anything wireless is overrun by thieves looking for a free piggyback. We use a DSL link and since there's only one phone jack in the house it's convenient to keep it all together. Our phones are a wireless 4 receiver setup so that the call that comes in on the wire can be answered in 4 different rooms, and the phone has a built-in recorder that's very reliable, unlike the cell phone message recording.

We've also found cell phones unusable in lots of places nearby, with the cell phone working fine in one town but useless ten miles down the road. Only sometimes, another old phone would work if the main one didn't, but we gave up on trying to keep more than one at a time up and turned on.

In actual fact, we find that we get far more advertising crap on our cell phones than on the land line. (close to 4 to 1?), and each illegal call to the cell phone costs us a separate charge for diverting it to messaging or text, while there's no extra charge when they get to us on the land line. (We didn't ask for either messaging or text for the cells, but they changed their minds and added it, without our permission, after we began using the cell phones and refuse to remove it.)

Since we mostly only leave the house to go visit our medical support people (who mostly ask us to turn the cell phone off while we're there) we don't actually get much use out of our $9/month (each) cell phones, but they actually are really necessary when "she" hops onto one of the handicap scooters and disappears in Wally World. Even with my "walker" (a shopping cart to lean on does help) I can't chase her down as fast, or as far, as the scooters will run, so 90% of our calls are to find each other in the larger stores.

Even for that use it's not too reliable, since about half the times when I want to find her, her phone is at home on the charger or she left her purse (with the phone in it) in the truck because she didn't want to lug it around, but 50% is still pretty good compared to the usefulness (in our area) of our cell phones for more general purposes, due to the erratic connections. (She doesn't often care where I am, since she's got a scooter and can zip around demolishing the furniture and sales stock until the battery goes dead - which has happened a couple of times. Then she cares and it's my fault she didn't have her phone, of course. I am getting better at reminding her, and really do try hard.)

Lots of places do have better wireless connectivity than we do, and for those where it works I wouldn't argue with dropping the landline. In the US, though, so far as I can see, "everywhere connectivity" is still sort of a myth.

John