Does my business still need a landline?

The question underneath the question

Nobody actually wants a landline. What people want is the thing they believe a landline guarantees: that the phone works when everything else does not. That is a reasonable thing to want, and it deserves a better answer than either side of this argument usually gives.

So separate two things. Your business calls — the ones customers make to reach a person — almost certainly do not need a physical line any more. Canadian numbering resources are administered under regulatory oversight and assigned to carriers under approved guidelines [1]; your number is a routing record, and it behaves the same whether the call arrives over copper or over your internet connection. That part of the question is settled.

The unsettled part is everything else attached to your building, and that is where this article spends its time.

What genuinely might still need a physical line

Your alarm panel. Some panels dial out over an analogue line, some are certified for other paths, and your insurer or your premises category may specify which. Ask your monitoring company what your specific panel is approved to use, and get the answer in writing. Do not decide this from a general article, including this one.

Your elevator phone. Elevator emergency phones typically carry their own requirements, usually set by building or safety rules rather than by your phone provider. Treat this as a compliance question, not a telecoms one, and confirm before you change anything.

Fax and payment devices. Some still work fine over a converted analogue port, some are fussy, and some have a modern replacement you should have moved to years ago. Test rather than assume.

Gate intercoms, buzzers, and anything else that dials out by itself. These are easy to forget precisely because no human ever uses them, and they are usually discovered when they stop working.

The general approach to keeping this equipment while moving your actual phones is covered in analogue lines on a hosted phone system. The point is that the answer is per device. "Keep the landline" and "drop the landline" are both the wrong shape of decision.

The power argument, honestly

The strongest genuine case for a traditional line is that it can carry enough power to run a simple corded handset when the building has none. That is real.

It is also narrower than it sounds. It only helps if you still own a basic corded phone and know where it is; most businesses do not. It does nothing for a cordless base station, a multi-line desk system, or any handset with a power adapter, all of which go dark with the lights. And a small battery backup on your router and a phone in your pocket cover the same scenario for most premises.

So weigh it rather than accepting it as a slogan. For a rural site with frequent long outages and a genuine safety need, it can be the deciding factor. For a downtown office, it usually is not.

The outage argument, and the better answer

The other reason people keep a line is the internet going down. This is a legitimate worry and the wrong solution.

Keeping a copper line as insurance means paying every month for something nobody uses, that nobody tests, and that will not be answered when the day comes because the phone attached to it is in a cupboard. The better answer is routing: when your building becomes unreachable, calls automatically go somewhere that is still reachable, normally mobiles, without anyone deciding anything in the middle of a bad morning. That is covered in what happens to your phones if the internet goes down.

The one thing worth insisting on: test it once, deliberately, and know what it does before you need it.

Emergency calling is the part to get right

This is where the landline question stops being about convenience.

Emergency services are organised by geographic region, so an emergency call has to reach the answering point responsible for where you physically are. Best-practice guidance for internet-based emergency calling is explicit that because emergency services are local to specific geographic regions, a caller must obtain their location prior to making emergency calls, and recommends that civic addresses be validated before being entered into the routing database [2].

Translated: it works, and it works through a civic address registered against your service. What it does not do is configure itself. Confirm in writing which address is on file for each service and each extension, and update it whenever anything moves. If your people work remotely through a private network tunnel, be aware that tunnels can obscure which access network actually knows the location, which is documented as significantly complicating emergency calling [3]. That is a real thing to check with a remote team, not a footnote.

If you are moving premises, this becomes urgent rather than important: see can I keep my phone number if I move offices.

What you actually gain by dropping the desk-phone landline

Not just a lower bill. The things a physical line structurally cannot do:

One number ringing a desk phone and a mobile at the same time, rather than a chain of forwards. Extensions and internal transfers without dialling outside numbers, described in what a phone extension is. Hours that change how the number behaves after you close. Voicemail delivered as email so messages get actioned. A second person able to answer the same number, which is covered in can two people answer the same business number. And call records you can actually read, which is what makes measuring your missed calls possible at all.

A wider comparison of the two approaches is in hosted versus on-premise phone systems in Canada.

How to decide, in order

First, list every physical line you pay for and what is actually plugged into each one. Most businesses cannot do this from memory, and the exercise alone usually finds a line nobody has used in years.

Second, for each one, ask what would break if it stopped tomorrow. If the answer is "nothing", you have found savings. If the answer is the alarm or the elevator, that is a written question for the monitoring company or the building, not a judgement call.

Third, move the human phone calls, keep whatever genuinely has to stay, and confirm your emergency addresses. Sequencing for that is in the 30-day cutover runbook.

Fourth, do not cancel anything until the replacement is confirmed working. This is the same discipline that applies to moving a business number, and for the same reason.

Where we sit

We run hosted phone systems for Canadian businesses, and we do not tell people to rip out every physical line. We tell them to know what each one is for. Usually the desk phones move and one or two building services stay, and the monthly cost of a small number of retained lines is a fair price for not guessing about an alarm panel.

Two things to watch while you are being sold to. Ask for the all-in monthly figure including anything mandatory, since a price that is not attainable because of fixed obligatory charges is treated as a false or misleading representation under subsection 74.01(1.3) of the Competition Act [5]; ours is published on the pricing page. And if anyone tells you their service is more reliable than your existing line, ask what they tested at your site, because a performance claim has to rest on an adequate and proper test and the burden of proving it is theirs [5].

Most of Canada's 1.08 million small businesses [6] are making this decision with no in-house telecoms knowledge, and dependable telephone service is treated in Canadian law as infrastructure rather than a luxury, which is the plain sense of the objectives in section 7 of the Telecommunications Act [4]. You should be able to drop what you do not need without gambling on the things you do.