Going Cell Only

Nov 8, 2009

I have a land line telephone at home, along with a really old cell phone. I'm thinking about ditching the land line and going cell only on a smart phone (I'm looking at the Motorola Droid). Has anyone else here gone cell only? If so, what do you think about it? There are a few edge cases I'm mildly concerned about in migrating to a cell only scenario:

Emergency Contact at Night
Let's assume someone else needs to get a hold of me late at night. Do I simply keep my cell phone on all the time? I'm assuming I would (it would be connected to the charger overnight). With a land line, this is obviously not a problem.
Loss or Theft of Cell Phone
Suppose the cell phone is either lost or stolen. Replacing it is a no brainer, but in the mean time there would be no fallback plan (right?).
Cell Phone Outages
Rarely, cell phone outages occur (say, from a hurricane). This is, admittedly, an extreme edge case. Land lines can similarly go out in these cases. But what is the fallback plan for outages? Is there one?

I know these are edge cases, but I'm trying to think about all the possibilities before I make the plunge. Any other advice on going cell only?

1 Comment

Michael

7:13 PM on Nov 19, 2009
Cell only has been good for me, but I do not think that my life is suitably generic to suggest that this fact means it'd be good for anyone else. Re: Loss/Theft: buy a prepaid phone and store it somewhere (in your home or work), then if you lose your phone, you have another ready to go. (you could just buy it when you lose your phone, but then you will have to have lost your phone during business hours) I think in the extreme cases like disasters, that the wireless networks seem more redundant, and therefore more robust? Before you make the switch, if possible, get a phone on the service provider you intend to go with (borrow a friend's, go ahead and get that pre-payed...) and call it while it's in various sensible locations in your house. At ours last house, AT&T (we all had them as our cell provider) got terrible signal in our living room, presumably (and actually) where most of our time was spent.

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