The better question might be why haven’t I? The cable company that delivers our cable TV and internet service has been advertising a triple option to include cable phone service. You get to keep your telephone number (thanks to a government statute enacted several years ago) and the premise is that overall you will spend less by combining services. And this is certainly true in year one but subsequently it the gap closes a bit but overall it is still less expensive to have cable phone service than a traditional land line.

For years the argument against cable telephone service was that if the cable service went out – so would your phone service. And while all of us at my house had mobile service (spotty service due to where we live), emergency calls might be a problem from a mobile phone (turns out that’s not true).

Last week like many areas in the United States the Northeast was hit by severe thunderstorms and our area on Wednesday in Connecticut in particular. We lost power for nearly 24 hours and many people lost power for much longer than that. But we also lost our home landline phone service at the same time.

Fortunately mobile phones work well enough at our house to be a reliable back up. We have a small generator so we had limited power (no air-conditioning!), and still the phone was out and when we called AT & T told us we would have phone service back after the weekend on Tuesday (tomorrow).

That’s a week without home phone service folks. Since I rarely use the phone at home it was no real hardship for me (come to think of it only my wife really uses the phone at home) or our daughter. Tue result is we are going to dump our AT & T home phone service since the whole reason for keeping it turns out to not be valid.

It’s in keeping with the way telecommunication companies view phone service now with the majority of their focus being (and rightly so) on mobile service. Yet it still amazes me that AT & T could consider a residence without phone service for a week to be acceptable. It’s exceedingly obvious that they’ve given up that ship by their action – or inaction.

Our son has no landline where he lives in Florida – and I doubt he ever will nor will our daughter. People under 30 roll their eyes at the notion of a landline saying – ‘what for?’

So how about you? Do you still have landline phone service at home? Why?