Is it time to ditch your landline?

Introduction	The VoIP factor
Finding your voice	Landline-free options

Tired of watching your phone bill soar as Telstra uses fixed-line rental increases to jack up its profits? Getting rid of your land line is now easier than ever. CNET.com.au weighs up the options.

As soon as he moved into his new apartment last year, Tom Glasson knew he didn't want to get a land line. "I have a mobile and use it for all my phone calls," says Glasson, a finance lawyer with Allans Arthur Robinson in Sydney and a TV script writer in his spare time. "It just came down to me needing Internet access, and I looked around and realised that there was going to be a better way in case I moved to another apartment."

Rather than investing in the rigmarole of connecting a fixed line and paying the AU$40-odd monthly rental, Glasson decided his Internet needs could be more than satisfied by a wireless broadband service from Unwired. Using Unwired's dedicated modem, he can get online anywhere he happens to be - whether at his apartment, at his office or even while visiting friends or family throughout Sydney.

With the mobile handling voice calls, he has no need for a fixed line at all. Glasson is one of a growing number of people who, disenchanted with the spiralling cost of fixed lines and more likely to use their mobiles for calls anyways, are doing away with a hundred years of history and ditching their landlines completely.

Until recently, this was a difficult luxury: although mobile phones have well and truly taken voice on the road, anybody wanting Internet access needed a fixed line, whether using slow dial-up connections or faster ADSL broadband, which cannot function without the local copper wiring connecting every home in Australia with its local telephone exchange.

A few years back, Unwired and arch-rival Personal Broadband Australia changed that by offering fixed wireless data services at speeds that approximate those of a healthy ADSL connection. They can't match the 20-megabit performance of newer ADSL2+ connections, but for the average user such connections offer more than enough speed for casual browsing (beginning next year, by the way, faster WiMAX wireless connections will boost wireless data speeds substantially).

Just because it's now technically possible to exist without your landline doesn't mean you should rush out and sign up, however; it's possible to pay more than the cost of a landline if you don't pick your services carefully. Take some time to consider available pricing plans and technologies, and you may find your best landline-free option can also be quite affordable as well.