Don’t Let Your Landline Go Dead If You Live in These States

For some homeowners, landlines may take you back to your younger years—long before cellphones made their debut.

However, if you live in a region prone to hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, or floods, it might be time to bring them back. 

“Landlines sound old-school, but from a reliability standpoint, they’re still worth maintaining in disaster areas,” says Rory Bokser, tech infrastructure specialist and head of product at Moken.io in Dallas.

Compared with cellphones, landlines provide a more reliable connection during power outages and emergencies, offering the peace of mind you may be longing for as a homeowner in a high-risk area.

Benefits of keeping a landline in climate-affected zones

If you live in a state with high climate risk, such as Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, or Texas, a landline could be the ultimate lifeline in case of an emergency.

The best reason for a landline in a climate-vulnerable area has little to do with sentimentality and more to do with physics.

“Analog landlines rely on physical copper wire to transmit calls and operate independent of your home’s electricity,” explains Bokser.

Cell towers, on the other hand, can overheat in a wildfire, get overloaded during a hurricane, or require a 72-hour utility blackout, like they did in Northern California last year.

“Analog phone lines keep on trucking. If there is one call you need to make to save your life, you do not want it zipping around five cell towers and a dead router,” says Bokser.

When everyone is calling their loved ones or 911 after an earthquake or flood, the cell towers get saturated. Since landlines don’t transmit over the same network, 911 calls will more likely be able to get through almost immediately. While a landline is old-school tech, it won’t skip a beat if 10,000 people hit redial at once.

Emergency access also works faster with landlines because 911 systems can triangulate the physical address immediately using tied-in databases.

“There is a baked-in, hardwired priority to landline infrastructure. In urban or high-density zones/high-rises, that variance can be the difference between life and death,” explains Bokser.

The cost of maintaining a landline

A basic landline will set you back $25 per month or so and will include local calling. Drop the caller ID, voicemail, and unlimited long distance and you can likely get it under $15. Even better, if you bundle the service with a DSL or fiber package, you can shave an additional $5 to $10 off your bill. 

“Virtually all telecommunications companies offer landline service at steep discounts to consumers today to preserve their POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) infrastructure, while also avoiding FCC or state regulatory scrutiny,” says Bosker.

When you consider the affordability of landlines as well as the peace of mind and safety they can bring you, investing in one quickly becomes a no-brainer, especially if you live in a high-risk area.

How to check if your home still has a phone jack available

To locate existing phone jacks, simply look for spots where older phones may have sat in your home—likely near baseboards and wall plates. Also, keep your eyes out for RJ11 style ports, which are smaller than the newer RJ45 Ethernet ports.

Closets, bedrooms, and garages are good places to look because jacks are often camouflaged by furniture. Pull all the wall plates and if there are screws, there’s a good chance a jack used to be there. “If copper wires (two small wires) are coming in behind the plate, you have the infrastructure,” explains Bosker.

Then, call your regional telecommunications company and ask it if they support “Plain Old Telephone Service” (POTS) at your address.

“If they say yes, they can often activate the line remotely in under 30 minutes. If they say no, ask if they can install VoIP [voice over internet protocol] with analog passthrough and they will likely put in a modem that can feed into your existing wall jack,” adds Bosker.

In the worse-case scenario, you can buy a $40 ATA (analog telephone adapter) and plug it in to your router yourself. Just be sure to connect a corded phone first as cordless phones do not work during outages.

Also, don’t forget you have alternative options if jack outlets are no longer there. “Buy a VoIP adapter. Grab a Grandstream HT801 or an Ooma Telo for about $60. Plug it into your modem and feed it into your home’s phone wiring through any of your wall jacks,” says Bosker.

This will provide you with “landline-like” service for all of your home phones using broadband. The bonus: These adapters tend to come with built-in E911 support plus voicemail and call filtering features, making them far more useful than your standard landline. 

Just one note of caution: If power fails and your modem goes out, so does the line unless it has backup.