7 Practical Reasons for Having a Home Phone
Who would use a home phone in this day and age? You may be surprised to hear that thousands of Canadians either still use home phones or have gone back to using them. Why?
Home Phones Are Inexpensive
You can buy a home phone landline for around $15 a month. That’s far cheaper than the plan of the pre-smartphone era.
Home Phones Offer Good Long-Distance Plans
Local calling isn’t the only thing that’s inexpensive. Home phones can offer better international calling plans than smartphones.
Home Phones Are a Smart Backup Plan
What happens when your smartphone is without charge? Dropped in water? Getting repaired at the store? Or dead and you’re waiting on a new one? It’s silly to be without a backup phone number.
That’s not to mention the other smartphone-related problems of our era, like network outages, lengthy software updates, tower replacements, or screen cracks.
Home Phones Are Equalizers
Some family members, such as children and older adults, may not have smartphones but may still need to make calls. Home phones give them the opportunity to do so.
Home Phones Prevent Muted Missed Calls
How often do you accidentally leave your smartphone on mute and subsequently miss an important call? With a home phone, you don’t have that problem.
Home Phones Are Good for Night-time Emergency Calls
It’s good—for both sleep and sanity—to turn off smartphones. Keeping smartphones out of bedrooms entirely is for the best—this has been studied. But if you’re like us, one of the reasons we keep smartphones powered on (and nearby) is in case of emergencies. You don’t want to miss the kind of frantic, bad news call you might get at night.
That’s where a home phone comes in. The home phone gives people a way to contact you, if necessary, but without the temptations and problems of having a smartphone in the bedroom.
Home Phones Have Superior Voice Quality
The biggest reason to have a home phone is this: they have excellent vocal quality. You can hear clearly and be heard clearly when you use a home phone.
Smartphones have evolved to become messaging tools that put the internet in your pocket. They do hundreds of things, and they also happen to be phones. That isn’t bad, but it does mean that the voice quality you get on a smartphone suffers as a result, never mind the poor reception you might get in some parts of your home.
The Big Takeaway
If you want to use your phone as a phone, then home phones are better than smartphones. They have better voice quality, they’re less expensive, they’re easy for the whole family to use, and they’re a good backup plan. Plus: no one ever expects a video call over a home phone, which we’re pretty happy about.
