I have taken the plunge and become one of the 14%.  I have completely given up my landline service and am now living with just a wireless phone.  Well, almost.  That 14% refers to the households that have no landline service and only wireless service - in fairness, we've still got a landline phone in the house as our "house line" but it rarely gets used.  In fact, these days when a call comes in on it it's a virtual certainty that there's a telemarketer on the other end. 

But back to the matter at hand - going completely wireless.  As readers of this blog may recall I've talked about going completely wireless in an earlier post and decided to wait.  There were lots of reasons for it, including the commonly feared problems of safety, convenience issues, etc.  I was concerned about having to carry my wireless phone (an iPhone) around the house all the time, what would happen if my local cell site went down, whether it would be a hassle to get everyone to switch the phone numbers to reach me in their address books and so on.  Turns out it was a lot easier and painless than I had anticipated.  There was one hangup (no pun intended) that delayed the process but once I got over that things happened quickly. 

Let's talk about the hangup first - my phone number.  I'm a fanatic for "good" numbers and work hard to extract them from the local phone companies.  For example, my work number was (and still is - I'll get to that in a moment) XXX-222-8600.  My cell phone has similarly repeating patterns and my home line - the one that we kept as our "house line" ends in "7777."  Giving up my "222-8600" number wasn't an option for me for a couple of reasons: First, I like the number and wanted to keep it in case I needed it in the future.  Second, I did want to maintain a number for business-only usage and to use to register on web sites, give out to strangers or vendors that needed to contact me and for other similar situations.  So I needed to find a way to keep the number but without paying the ridiculous fees that the phone company wanted for various methods to maintain the number.  

My landline provider, AT&T (formerly SBC) provided me with a package of services including unlimited long distance, call forwarding and call waiting, caller ID and other features for about $45/month.  Not a bad deal if you need the service.  Adding the taxes and other fees to it brought the monthly charge to about $65/month, which always irked the hell out of me.  (Note that wireless services are no different - in some states taxes and fees can add as much as 20% to your monthly bill.)  I sure wasn't using enough of it to warrant a $800/year expense so I contacted the good folks at AT&T to see if there was a way to put the number into some kind of hibernation, vacation mode or whatever so that it simply forwarded to another number.  I figured that I could forward it to one of the free services like GrandCentral and have all the calls go directly to voicemail and simply get a text alert on my cell phone (in addition to an email with the message attached in .WAV format as an option) when a message arrived. 

Not so fast.  The phone company charges $15/month to remotely forward the number and by the time you finish with the fees and taxes it's closer to $25/month - and for that you don't even have a landline to use, just a number that forwards to someplace else.  This wasn't the solution that I was looking for so I started combing the net.  One of the first places that I tried was, in fact, GrandCentral.com, thinking that if I could port my number to their service I could accomplish both of my goals - keeping the number and reducing the monthly fees - in one swing.  GrandCentral doesn't allow porting yet but says that it's likely to occur in the future.  

As I searched through the fast number of bookmarked sites that I store whenever I see something that's cool, free or telecom-related, I recognized a familiar service that I had used before - RingCentral.com.  RingCentral would provide me with the solution I needed and open the door to going completely wireless. 

How I did it and how it's working in part 2, following in a couple of days.