A friend does and he likes it.

The hardware is a send/receive station that carries the signal over the mobile phone network. You plug an analog phone into it, either a single phone with a cord or a home cordless phone base station if you want multiple locations. My friend has a second home and he uses it to have his "home phone" available wherever he is. (Note, there are other ways to do the same thing using an internet connection if you have a "landline").

So long as where you'd use it has an adequate Verizon Wireless signal, it should work fine. My friend's provides very good sound quality.

I know nothing about the cost.

Thanks much!

Try Ooma. One time fee for their box and thereafter only pay the tax.

It's VOIP that cost me about $6.25 per month in taxes for unlimited phone service. Pick up any phone in my house - cordless or hard wire, just as before.

Thanks, I'll look into that.

With any VOIP you'll need an internet service separately. The quality of the voice on the phone is dependent on the quality of the internet service you have.

In my home the Ooma box, bought from amazon.com for about $90 sits next to my router. Box plugs in to router. My copper phone wires within the house are now disconnected from the street at the interface box on my outsde foundation wall. I have a 3 ft phone cord plugged in to the Ooma box and into a nearby phone wall jack.

If you think about it, my Ooma box is now seen and seen by every phone jack in the house - the ones with my hard connected phones, the base phone for my cordless phone.

I have my Ooma box set to simultaneously ring my cell phone when someone calls the house. Not call forwarding! On my cell phone's caller ID I see the number and info for the phone originating the call to my house.

I had Vonage before - it was OK, but more expensive. I've had no need for Customer service with either VOIP.

Ooma Box

Thanks much!

When you say the $20/mo Verizon phone service, do you mean the stand-alone POTS wired service? (POTS means Plain Old Telephone Service, e.g. the copper wire). I have two experiences with this. A few years ago, at one home, I had Verizon POTS service. It worked fairly well, I even had DLS internet. But there were many maintenance problems so when Verizon installed FIOS (their fiber optics network) on my block, they offered that to me at no additional cost. BTW, this service did NOT include television. Recently, at my other home, I was looking for internet service and Verizon has a telephone cable running through my property. I asked if I could get internet through that and they said that it's POTS and wouldn't even support DSL. So I ended up with a cable triple-play package which includes telephone (which I don't use because I have cell service not).

The main, practical difference between these "land lines" supplied by the cable companies is that they require power at your home to operate. The POTS service doesn't - you have a power outage and your phone still works (assuming the phone itself doesn't need power). An old-fashioned dial phone doesn't need any power. You may say that the VOIP phones have battery backup but that battery doesn't last very long.

Of course Fios requires power also. Also, if the power loss is an area outage Fios additionally has battery backup at various local distribution locations and these batteries also deplete.

I got rid of Fios because of terrible connection issues for my internet.