OT New phone number fun (2025 Update)

VOIP is not a land line in the conventional sense and as you said, wherever you go it is the same to the TELCO. Your phone number is still handled in your original central office and routed to the internet provider from there. If you live across the street from me with your VOIP phone and I dial your new jersey area code to get you, I am paying a long distance charge if it was not bundled into my phone service. I would not show an LD charge to call my daughter in Michigan because she has a local to me number on her cell. Her next door neighbor would. This kind of thing is why most cell and even POTS plans include free roaming and LD within the US.

To continue with this, I see others taking the definition to mean that a landline is POTS only. But then they need to change those definitions because they sure don't say that. With VOIP, you still have a wire, cable, fiber, etc between the two phones, just on a different system. Also, say you call up Bob on his cell and he doesn't answer. So, you're going to say to someone that you're now going to try him on his....? What? Home phone would come naturally. But suppose you can't use that term, what would you say? I'd say I'm going to call him on his landline, whether that phone is POTS or VOIP. I'd say if you want to make it clear that you're talking only about POTS then that's the term that should be used and I agree that's the correct term as opposed to copper, though the vast majority of those connections, virtually all of them to homes are in fact on copper wire.

Correct, but they won't port a number to a different area code 1400 miles away.

Not what? That you can't port a Verizon FIOS number?

Say what? Those VOIP services are nothing like a cell phone, they are routed as internet packets. AFAIK, cell phone calls are still on the public switched phone network.

That makes no sense. If you have a cell phone and port it to another cell phone carrier, why would it suddenly turn into going over the internet, instead of staying withing the phone switching network?

I've seen lots and lots of reports of people porting numbers and it has little to do with where you are, nor is there any need to stay within the area code or central office. A lot of people have ported their phone numbers to Google Voice, for example. Apparently they can accept most numbers from anywhere in the country. People do that to keep their number and to hopefully not have to port it again.

The essential issue here is what exactly defines "landline". If you follow those definitions above, then by my reading of them, VOIP is still included. If you can't get someone on their cell, and you say to someone, I'm going to try Bob on his....? What word would you use? Home phone would be an obvious choice. If you couldn't use that, what would you say? I'd say landline whether it was POTS or VOIP. IDK what else you could say, because in most cases you don't know whether it's POTS or VOIP and don't care.

Over the years the phones sure have changed.

At one time AI knew 2 brothers that lived next to each other. Between their houses was a field about 200 feet across. Each was in a different phone company area and it was long distance for them to call each other.

Now the local cable/internet service offers for free a very handy service. You have the internet phone through them. You can set it so that if your internet phone rings, it will ring your cell phone at the same time. As far as the internet phone goes, there is no long distance calls or time limits to phones in the US. Not sure about out of the US. Try and figuer that one out as far as a land line or wireless depending on what you use to answer with.

If you have a magic jack/vonage type system the central office is in the cloud so you can have any number you like within reason but if the local telco is sending you dial tone, your phone comes through your local office, whether that is FIOS or regular copper. Your phone number is captive to the trunks that come through that office, again whether they are copper, fiber or RF. Ed already said he could not port his number so I am not sure why you are still arguing about nomenclature.

Seems like there may be several kinds of phones involved.

I have a cell phone that mainly locks onto an open internet service first and if no internet is in range it will go to a cell tower.

The phone I have at home which I call a land line (right or wrong) works by plugging my regular telephone into the cable modem. There is a jack on the modem that converts whatever phone call comming down the cable line to work with a regular phone. In fact I have it wired into my home phone wiring so I can answer it from 4 or 5 phones that are in other placws of the house. Those phones will not work without being directly connected to the cable modem box.

They stopped years back. Sears and K-Mart are both long gone here. I miss the Craftsman tools although towards the end you had to be careful you weren't getting Sort Of Craftsman.

They tore down K-Mart and built a Cabelas but I'm not sure that was exactly progress.

The last item I looked at in Cabelas was a Kershaw Leek knife. It was $10 cheaper up the road at Sportsmans Warehouse, and $10 cheaper than that at Amazon. I used to get their catalogs but I never saw any outstanding bargains.

What really soured me was when they started buying up acreage for a hunting lease scheme.

I used to stop at the mother ship in Sidney. They weren't stupid and had plenty of 18-wheeler parking. Real estate isn't exactly a problem i that part of Nebraska. I've been to the one in Glendale and that was a real CF with a small sedan.

I live in DE and shop Cabela's here. I've been to their PA store in Hamburg and it is much bigger particularly with the trophy display there. I thought they should have built one of their first stores in DE as we have no sales tax and did not realize they were so big in guns and permitting makes more difficult. Store is in the mall but outside, independent with plenty of close parking.

It is the worst place to buy a gun. My experience was standing in line maybe a half hour having taken a number to get a clerk. Then gun was delivered to the permit counter and again I waited in a long line. I made an error in putting my information into the FBI computer, was rejected, and had to do it again. Then the computer went down and they did not know when it would be up. I had expected that they would call me to come back when it cleared and they said no. I would have to call them and reenter the data when computer was back up. I walked out leaving gun and ammo on the counter. There was a guy from PA buying a rifle and this was his second trip to the store and he had to leave and come back again. Ridiculous. I bought the gun in a small shop and was in and out in 10 minutes. Had my info not cleared, shop would have called me back when it did.

I've never had problems like that. The closest would be Sports Authority. They had a few guns in the back corner and when they had a sale on Marlin .22s I bought one. It was like 'oh s*it, a gun! I forgot we sold those.' They still got me out the door a lot faster.

Kittery Trading Post was a little more complex for handguns. They are in Maine and I lived in New Hampshire. You did all the paperwork in the Maine store and then a gopher drove across the bridge to Portsmouth where they had a storefront. He'd unlock the door, walk in, and give you the gun. Duly delivered by a FFL holder, he'd lock up and go back to Maine.

I've had this landline for almost 10 years and last night I got a call for Steve, again. In my previous city, where I lived for some 36 years, I still got calls for Terry, a State Farm agent just prior to moving.