How to fire the phone company

If you do a reverse lookup on some of the friends and acquaintances in your address book, you might be surprised to find that their home or business phone is actually a mobile number. Cell phones are rapidly supplanting landlines for primary residential or small business voice service. People like having a single phone that rings in the house and on the road, and cell phone rate plans can be cheaper than wired service from your local telco, especially if you do a lot of long distance calling or need multiple phone lines. Small and home-based businesses in particular can save a ton of money by using consumer cell service instead of buying business landlines.

Cellular’s advantages over wired phone service seem innumerable and obvious; cost, convenience, portability, flat rate billing, choice, and cool devices top the list. However, the pitfalls of going fully wireless can sneak up on you, so it’s important to plan ahead. You don’t want to snip your landline until you’re sure you’re better off without it.

[ Which is the best smartphone for business and professional use? See the InfoWorld Test Center review, “Clash of the handsets.” ]

Cellular isn’t a utility

Before you move toward making your cell phone your only phone, understand the drawbacks unique to wireless service. The most important difference between landline and cellular service is the utility factor. Your phone company guarantees dial tone to all of its subscribers. Modern wired phone networks in metro and suburban areas are geared to allow all subscribers simultaneous use of their phones. Anything less than noise-free, reliable voice connectivity to your building is an issue that the telco must address at its expense. If you hear static or crosstalk, if your phone drops calls, or people sound like they’re talking through a vacuum cleaner hose, the telco is obligated to repair it. Telephone companies are granted regional monopolies in return for providing utility-grade service.

Genuine service-level agreements kick in for wired business lines, regardless of the size of your account. That’s why business service costs more. I have residential and business service coming to my house, and the contrast in my telco’s responsiveness to trouble calls is stark. When I call repair for my business line, a knowledgeable human with access to the infrastructure answers the phone, and same-day dispatch is typical. When I call residential repair, I get IVR (interactive voice response), then after several hours’ delay, I get a call back from an Indian call center agent with a mission to upsell.

What happens when you call 911? Landlines’ usefulness in an emergency isn’t a telco scare tactic. You know that when you call from your home or office landline, caller ID puts your address on emergency services’ screen. Even if you can’t speak, even if you train your toddler or your dog to call if you should pass out or fall off the roof, dispatchers know where to send the responders. Cell phone 911 operators can’t tell where you’re calling from, even if you have a fancy GPS phone, and they can’t dispatch responders directly. When you tell them your location, they call your local emergency services. That’s a conversation you can’t have when you’re choking or unconscious, and it’s a critical consideration for anyone with heath problems. Likewise, cell service cannot be used to monitor alarm systems or with other automated dialing mechanisms built for wired use. Even if you have the skill to hack an auto-dialer to use cell instead, cellular plan terms of service tend to forbid this use.

Wireless service carries no guarantees of service availability or quality, no matter how much you pay. The infrastructure is intentionally oversold; no operator can handle even a majority of its subscribers placing simultaneous calls. If the sound quality of your cell calls stinks, if calls drop mid-conversation, or an urgent call gets diverted to voice mail, your cellular operator isn’t dispatching a technician. You know before you call that it’s your problem, and the best you can hope for is a few bucks off your bill. Fortunately, the situation is improving. The trend toward replacing landlines with cellular service is moving wireless operators to beef up their coverage in residential areas. The rush to sell lucrative wireless Internet services is creating a boom in voice capacity and quality. If you’re lucky enough to live in a demographically privileged area, you probably have your choice of operators that can give you wired-quality service. Just know that none of them will guarantee it.

The simpler, the better

In some cases, the choice between wireless and landline is a no-brainer. If you’re the only one who ever answers your home phone number, you work outside the house, and the only thing you do with your phone is make phone calls, then go ahead and fire your phone company. You can use your desk phone to make and take calls during costly metered weekday hours, so you can probably make do with a standard $39.95, 300-daytime-minute rate plan. Take advantage of calling circles (like T-Mobile MyFaves) that bypass per-minute and long distance charges for a small group of numbers. Put the people you talk with the longest, not necessarily those whom you call most often, in your calling circle.

A lot of people who dump their landlines forget that incoming calls cost money, too. There is a minimum minute charge for every call that kicks in as soon as you hit the green key — wrong numbers, telemarketers, and robo-dialing fundraisers included. You’re not billed airtime for calls that go to voice mail, but you do pay airtime charges for calls that are forwarded, and charges might apply when you call to get your voice mail from your cell phone. Calling circle plans may apply their discounts only to outgoing calls, so someone who calls you from within your circle might chew up your precious daytime minutes (solution: call them back). Make sure you understand the terms of plan discounts, and consider whether they’re a match for the way you use your phone most often.

Gonna get you, sucker!

Wireless operators make next to nothing on basic voice plan subscribers. They shoot for maximum ARPU (average revenue per user) and pursuing that objective lays a host of alluring browsing, streaming, and downloading services on your device’s home screen. These icons tend to show up whether their use is included in your rate plan or not. That which is not included is billed on a metered basis, with scant notice, if any, when the metered charges kick in. You may be able to resist temptation, but someone else who picks up your phone may not. Be aware, too, that you have to pay for the calls and services activated when your keys bump up against your phone’s keypad. Some of my longest, most costly conversations have taken place between my pocket or carry-on bag and the hapless soul assigned to an unintentionally mashed hotkey.

Where cellular Internet service is concerned, there is no such thing as “unlimited.” All of the wireless plan contracts I’ve read give the operator latitude to charge metered rates or kick customers to more expensive rate plans without notice for “excessive” use. While you have some control over the amount of talking you do, Internet transfers are nearly impossible to govern because much of it is handled opaquely by browsers and other connected tools. Horror stories of wireless bills in the thousands of dollars for unintentional overuse abound, and a common thread is that wireless operators have no empathy for sticker-shocked subscribers. Internet overage charges are the ARPU holy grail. I’ve yet to find a wireless plan that cuts off your Internet access when you’ve used up your prepaid kilobytes.

One question I’m frequently asked relates to tethering, the use of mobile device as a PC or Mac Internet gateway. Do wireless operators actually enforce rate plan tethering restrictions? Yes, they really do. Your phone, legitimately or via a hack, may work as an Internet gateway, but if tethering isn’t part of your coverage plan, you will eventually get caught. Here, too, the penalty is not having your BitTorrent session cut off, but the application of metered billing or a forced plan upgrade without warning. You might argue that your device shouldn’t tether if you don’t pay for it. Our culture’s demand for freedom to hack is at odds with handset manufacturers’ and wireless operators’ idiot-proofing. It generally requires effort to tether with a device that doesn’t want to, but packaged hacks and how-tos are easy to find.

It’s not a write-off

This last seems like a small thing, but it matters to professional users. There was a time when cellular service was used predominately for business, so it was commonplace to just write off the entire bill at tax time. The IRS has since gotten wise to the fact that, even when used or issued for work, mobile devices are gadgets, they’re toys, and monthly coverage charges include costs for personal text messages, phone calls, ringtone downloads, and Web access. Last year, the IRS went so far as to require that employers that subsidize cellular plans for their workers, or that provide workers with company cell phones, report the value of the monthly service as taxable income. I don’t know how well employers are complying with this, but where their compliance is lacking, it’s employees that end up paying the taxes and penalties after failing to plead their case in an audit. If you’re carrying a company-paid cell phone, know that it is anything but free.