I occasionally ask this from my internet friends: do you have access to a land-line telephone in your life (still)?

@tkoola Only at work. Constant spam reminds me of why it was a good idea not to have one installed at home.

@tkoola We do, it’s just bundled with net/tv. It’s not plugged in, though, turned it off a couple of months ago, when we needed the spot to plug something else, and noticed the phone was still there. We never used it.

@tkoola Yep

@tkoola Haven't had a landline since 1999.

@gregmoore yes, I think I also had my last one around that time

@tkoola I do not. My ISP has tried many times to tell me many times it's worth it to "save money" on bundles with my internet but I've always declined.

@tkoola not in the past 5 or 6 years. Even when I had as part of internet bundled, it was disconnected.

@rknightuk interesting, the Finnish operators have for the last 20 years strongly encouraged customers to drop land-lines and go mobile only.

@tkoola Yes - but it's in an inconvenient place since the fibre-optic went in.

@gregmoore @tkoola Similar, not since 2002 or so. I remember having multiple battles with customer service reps who insisted on getting two phone numbers. The most recent of those was in 2018, I think, when U-Haul's software wouldn't budge without two numbers.

@tkoola When we moved 5 years ago we didn't bother replacing our landline service. We had gradually stopped using it anyway as mobile phones took over.

@tkoola I kind of want one from a redundancy perspective.

@tkoola nope - it's been probably 10 years since we killed the landline.

@tkoola Technically no, but we have a house phone through our ISP/TV provider so we can give that number out to businesses we don't actually want to hear from.

@tkoola I believe my ISP has allocated us a landline number, so if we plugged a handset into our modem it should work (the number is VoIP rather than an old-school non-internet-based number), but we never have. Of the people I know who still have landlines, most of them don't even answer it because 99% of calls these days are spam 😕

@justanybeth oh, that is cool. Does the operator have a legal requirement to offer you telephone services? In Finland they modified that requirement so that operators needed to provide a service instead of with specific tech. After that the stopped selling land-lines altogether and then provided remote areas with cell towers.

@tkoola I keep a landline (VOIP) specifically for my mother to call. That's it.

@tkoola We moved to mobile-only about ten years ago but recently I've been thinking about getting a new land-line. Mostly so I can give it to businesses whose calls I can ignore, whilst then keeping my personal phone as personal as possible. I have become increasingly unhappy with mixing personal and impersonal on the same device.

@tkoola Does an old blue phone not plugged in to the wall and mostly used by stuffed animals count?

@idg it definitely does!

@tkoola I haven't had a land line since 2006 when I had my first apartment.