Landline Number

Landline phone lines have become increasingly irrelevant with the advent of cellular phones in terms of everyday social use, but they still hold an essential function in the lives of a billion people worldwide, according to the CIA.  The landline telephone is a number that is sent over telephone lines rather than through the radio waves that cellular phones are sent out over.  They are sent over a cable which sends an electric signal which the phone then interprets into sound upon receiving it.  This is the original form of the telephone, as Alexander Graham Bell created it.

There are a number of advantages and disadvantages to operating with a telephone landeline provider, and a number of reasons why they have more recently taken backseat to the cell phone.

Uses of a Landline Number

Landlines are useful for a number of reasons.  First, they are harder to jam up than cell phone lines.  If a ton of cell phone users try using their phone at once, it can jam up the radio signals, thus keeping them from effectively allowing everyone to make their calls.  For similar reasons, they are also more dependable than cell phones.  Since cells are mobile, they have to receive a signal everywhere they go, whereas the landline number doesn't need to find any sort of signal, because it is already plugged into the line itself.  This makes them much better for business meetings, as you'll be sure that you don't lose your service during an important meeting. 

They are also a little bit harder to bug and intercept.  Radio waves, even encoded radio waves, are easy to catch and easy to interpret.  So a private conversation over a cellular phone is going to be significantly easier for authorities, spies or whatever to trace.  Not that you've ever done anything illegal.  However, if there is any sort of suspicion over you at all, the police and whoever can relatively easily bug a landline number, it's just a matter of selecting that individual line.

The other nice thing about landlines is that they are easier for the average person to trace.  Most phone companies set up a phone book, where all of the residents of a city are listed by their phone numbers.  Most of these phone companies offer a reverse phone number look-up as well.  This reverse look-up allows any missed or broken calls to be traced, so that the receiver can call back the person who called them in the first place.  Back during the age of the landline, this was useful particularly for the service known as *69, which, if you punched those keys, would tell you who the call was from.  The phone lines nowadays typically come with caller ID, where they can tell you immediately who is calling, unless the caller specifically requests not to be listed on caller ID or calls from an unidentified phone. 

Another perk of having a landline is that it can be bundled in with a number of other technologies that run through your house, most notably your cable, your internet, and if you live at an apartment with a buzzer system, your intercom.

Cons of a Landline Number

Landlines are considerably less versatile than cellular phones because, by definition, they can NOT be brought anywhere.  Cell phones allow the caller to talk wherever they please, and should the caller need to make a call on the move, they are able to.  Landlines are somewhat inhibiting to multi-taskers.  Cell phones also make it easier to reach people at any given time, whereas landlines have to be near the person at the time you are calling for them to hear it and pick it up.

Because of the staggering rise of cell phones in the last decade or so, we may be seeing a discontinuation, more or less, of landlines as the main apparatus of contacting a person.  It will likely only be used by organizations that have high levels of security and don't wish to broadcast themselves over the open radio waves.  That said, there are these practical uses that make the landline number a useful tool, even in a cellular world.  They continue to be on the rise in the developing world (though cell phones are becoming popular at a much faster rate) though the developed world and the world as a whole is seeing a gradual decline of cellular phones.