Depends on where you live, what taxes and unfunded mandate compliance costs they tack on, how much your long distance carrier charges, etc. Plus the cost of a phone.

True of smartphone service. Dumbphone service can be far cheaper, depending on how long you spend on the phone every month.

I think that's the third time you've made that excuse. You really need to get that fixed. Perhaps after I finish explaining everything again, we can schedule a date to go into the cell phone shop.

Which carrier in which country is getting your $300 per year?

That might be the case for someone who drives. But I spend at least an hour a day if not more riding public transit to work and back, and the buses here lack Wi-Fi.

For an extra $500 per year on top of what you already pay for Internet at home. And no, you can't cancel your Internet at home and just use the 4G if you use any sort of video on demand (Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, or even just ads on web pages nowadays) because of the single digit GB/mo cap.

Good luck sending e-mail when all the hotspots around you have locks on them and none are willing to give the password to a non-employee.

Since when, and in what country? My U.S. carrier quoted me $35 per month for a smartphone or $5 per month for a dumbphone.

I can. For example, see this comment from someone complaining that he can't provide a environment in which his children can learn to program because all he has are tablets.

I think the idea is that you "buy a smell phone and pay for a plan" and then cancel your land line because a cell phone has become cheaper.

Because calling a land line doesn't always leave a "missed call" entry. Caller ID costs $100 per year extra on my home town's ILEC.

My point is that others did not, and they still expect to be able to contact you at the number you publish. You can't text at all from a land line, and doing so from a flip phone is a pain.

Because you already spent 25 seconds waiting for the phone to ring (for which cellular providers charge, but not land line long distance providers), plus 7 listening to the greeting that the user recorded.

There are still carriers that charge $100 per year extra for a call log. And these carriers still have customers.

Have you tried sending a text on a flip phone? Or a land line?

And you end up waiting for hours for someone to get to a desk to compose and send the email.

That's because a proper captive portal will MITM not only every DNS request on port 53 but also every HTTP request on port 80, no matter to what IP address, and block connections to unapproved IP addresses on all other ports. So even if your machine produces no outgoing packets on TCP or UDP port 53, the captive portal still grabs you when your machine opens a connection on port 80.

Not all cellular devices and plans support e-mail or IM, and sending a text from a flip phone is painful even with T9.