Be interested in members views on this.

In view of increasing landline  line rental costs etc, If you don't want/have fixed broadband,and your not worried about the emergency angle, can you think of any good  reason why you shouldn't ditch your landline and switch to mobile use ?

By the time that the Ofcom changes - "unbundled tariff" and "freephone means free calls" - come into effect, another radical change will be affecting the telecoms market. The termination rates paid on placing calls to mobile numbers will be (as near as damn it) equal to those paid on calls to landline numbers.

The effect will be two-fold. Firstly there will be no reason for charging for calls to mobile numbers at differential rates from calls to landlines. Secondly, a significant funding stream for the mobile operators will have been lost.

One could go a step further by concluding that unlimited calls to mobiles will be added to landline call plans and that mobile operators will have to introduce the equivalent of "line rental" charges to cover the cost of providing access to receive incoming calls. Both are possible and fairly natural, but I am only prepared to say that we are likely to see some fairly radical changes in the way that telephone services are offered around the middle of 2015.

Voice telephony is already becoming little more than an adjunct to broadband access for a new generation of users. This will also have a bearing on the way in which services are configured and presented to the market.

The question posed by the title of this thread could also be addressed to businesses, especially those who will be losing the benefit of their telephone service being subsidised through use of 084/087 numbers. That loss is not actually very significant as a proportion of the cost of providing a call centre service, but it may prompt consideration of the need to maintain voice telephone access. In the case of businesses, the alternative to a landline number is not a mobile number but an ip address connected to the www.

I believe that some very significant changes are not that far away. Quite a lot will hinge on the success of 4G.