Everyone has a mobile phone these days. In fact, smartphones are now so ubiquitous that there’s a good chance you’ve not used your home landline in a long time.
Things may be a little different if you have a business premises, but here are some reasons why we think you should hang on to your landline.
Is the landline disappearing?
The number of UK households that have a landline has fallen by four million since in the last 20 years.
22 million households now have a landline. This still a lot of tethered phones – 85% of homes – but that’s a 15% drop from the 95% of homes that had a landline at the turn of the millennium. Amazingly, 1.4 million households have got rid of their landline in the last three years, according to data from Statista, the market and consumer data specialists.
The data also shows that five million households that do have landlines don’t use them for phone calls, and more than a quarter don’t even have a phone attached. A third of households only have a landline because they need it for their broadband connection.
Which leads us nicely onto (possibly) the ultimate demise of the landline.
When is the big switch off?
The UK analogue landline system will be switched off completely by 2025, as we discussed in our blog The landline is dead. Long live the landline.
This means that, if you want to keep your landline, then you’ll most likely need to switch to VoIP.
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. This might sound a bit technical, but it simply means that from 2025, calls will be made over an internet connection instead of the copper cables that have been carrying phone calls for well over a century.
If you switch to business VoIP, you’ll be able to keep your existing number. You’ll also be able to use a local number or a national number for making and taking calls wherever you are.
What are the advantages of landline
Despite the triumph of the mobile network, it cannot keep up with the reliability of the fixed network to this day. Especially at large events, mobile networks are often overloaded, so that few or even no calls or messages can be made.
This is usually never the case with landlines. In addition, calls made over the landline have a much better sound quality, which makes them particularly attractive for conference calls where every word should be clearly audible.
In terms of price, landline telephones also have a lot ahead of smartphones: Both the initial purchase and the monthly costs of a telephone with a landline connection are significantly lower than those of a cell phone. Although the latter will push the fixed network back even further thanks to their many functions and flexibility.
A landline is also an easy way to make a conference call with up to 100 participants.
