Ditch Your Landline: FCC Rule Will Make It Simple

It’s your dirty little secret, the thing you don’t talk about at cocktail parties: you still have a landline. Meanwhile, your friends brag about the money they’ve saved by cutting the cord. True, most Americans are still tethered to a home phone line; however, as the complications of moving towards a wireless-only existence grow few, it’s become increasingly popular to cancel landline accounts.

Why do you need two phone numbers, anyway?

If you’ve been asking yourself that question, you got good news last week, when a bi-partisan group on Capitol Hill took action to simplify “porting” an existing landline phone number to a new cell phone account. Soon, it should be easy to reassign your home number to a cell phone.

The effort, led by Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), took the form of a new bill intended to push the FCC towards finalizing tentative rules it laid down last year regarding number portability. Wireless-to-wireless portability is already a common, painless process. However, it’s always been more difficult to port your landline number to a new cell phone account. Not for long.

The regulations in question are designed to (a) simplify the process by requiring less info from the consumer, and (b) boost the speed of the transition. Currently, it can take up to four days to shift your landline number to a wireless account. The FCC expects to cut that time in half - and it hopes to do so within a month.

So, if it’s time for you to go wireless, you’ll soon be able to - without the hassle of taking on a brand new number.