With the advent of more wireless home telephone service and fewer landlines, will consumers be left without home phones when a blackout hits?
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The traditional landline is already endangered by the rise of mobile devices—fewer people than ever are paying for such a connection in their home. And now the landline is being threatened by the cost of its own infrastructure. The New York Times reported this weekthat Verizon, citing the high cost of copper-wire landlines, doesn't want to replace those lines in Mantoloking, N.J., which suffered heavy damage from Hurricane Sandy. Instead, it wants customers to use its Voice Link wireless home phone system.
With a wireless home phone system, we're not talking about the cordless phones that have been around for years, with a cordless handset but a receiver that's connected to a landline. Rather, the kind of system that runs without the use of a landline at all. Michael Dellomo, an associate director of the University of Maryland's masters program in Telecommunications, says that wireless home phones are akin to merging the traditional landline and the cellphone.
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