Ethical phone landline

I’m looking for a phone landline for service in Oakland, CA.

I live on a hill that’s saturated with signals and few towers, and my apartment doesn’t have decent broadband infrastructure (it’s unreliable and slow), but provides very adequate copper wire connections; we used our landline often when we got it as part of our Sonic account.

I have to call in to group calls often, and I take long calls, so having a decent handset combined with a reliable landline will drastically improve my quality of life.

Okay… which landline service to use? I say “ethical” because I don’t want to deal with industry bullshit to chase pennies or bells and whistles. I want a consistent, affordable line for voice calling out over copper.

Well, did a dive and realized this is a weak point of the voice network, and also I really want walkie talkies.

Does Sonic offer a landline-only option?

I suppose since their offerings are on top of AT&T, I would guess using AT&T next? But are you trying to avoid that, with “ethical” haha?

Yep, trying to avoid it, but perhaps that isn’t possible.

@susan, if we get a landline we are looking at $40 a month. That is fine to be covered by my work, but from everything I’ve researched, the primary difference will be it works when the power is out. Which honestly might be something important for the times, but that isn’t what I’m trying to solve: I wanted a more reliable connection.

But here’s the rub: none of my calls are fully reliable. Everyone else is one zoom calls, and I’m calling in on my weak connection and can still be heard the best, because folks be not planning this well.

I think I’m going to stop looking for a landline and instead look into Walkie talkies for local community use. That covers the emergency use-case, and is something we have more autonomy over, which might just be something my mind needs to move forward.