Cutting the land line

Wireless service at our house is now good enough** that we moved to a family cell phone plan and cut the land line, a little more than 10 years after we initially planned on doing this, but discovering that cell phone service was terrible here.  So I made the call to Vonage this morning, and they took it surprisingly well, only trying to sell me on keeping my number (no, thank you, everyone who needs to know our new number either has it or knows how to reach us via e-mail, and we're happy to ditch all the junk calls***).  


Vonage, in turn, had replaced Verizon and Opex back in 2005 (separate local and long-distance carriers?  oh, my!), once we were sure that Adelphia's (now Comcast) cable internet connection wouldn't cut out so often that using VoIP as our sole phone service would be untenable.  The great thing about Vonage, from a data collection standpoint, is that it has been easy to collect all calls placed *and received* for the last 6 years****.  I only have long-distance placed calls from Opex prior to then.  Nothing from our Evanston days with MCI (aside from an angry letter contesting their charging of "peak" rate minutes for the entirety of calls that began at 6:56pm), and just the billed amounts from grad school (because we all want to relive the few $200 phone bills from that year Sarahmac was in France, when only students in the engineering school had e-mail -- most of the time we snail-mailed each other letters.  We still have those.  I don't remember the phone calls, except for a lot of protracted silences and sighing at $1/minute; still better than dialing a 1-900 number, I suppose). 


** though I use Google Voice to dial in to conference calls at work.  Their audio quality is better than Vonage's was, and free for now.


*** places that I do business with now get my Google Voice number.  I'm actually going to enjoy putting junk callers in my spam filter.


**** I hope to have something to say about analyzing that data, but need to anonymize the numbers first.  Even then, I'm worried what the call patterns would show about when we're home and when we're not.  Another good thing about cell phones.