My Orange landline: 12 euros for 3,000 minutes, not everyone's convinced

The landline that works like a mobile: 12 euros and 3,000 minutes for grandmas who never stop chatting

Can you replace your home landline with a wireless phone with a SIM card and pay half the price? The offer exists: a handset that works like a mobile but is sold as a landline, with a fee of around 12 euros a month and up to 3,000 minutes of calls to Spanish national landlines. The target customer is no accident. Elderly women whose only pastime is calling sisters and cousins, with Telefónica bills of around 32 euros and monthly phone usage of nearly 25 hours, according to the case described by a forum user.

On paper, the savings are striking: going from 31 euros plus VAT on a cable operator to 10 euros plus VAT. A calculation that comes to around 252 euros a year. The fine print exists too: calls to mobiles at 10 cents a minute plus 15 cents connection fee, a commitment period if you buy the handset at the promotional price, and the loss of any services tied to the original landline.

What those who already have it installed say

Real-life experiences come with caveats. One case involves an elderly mother: she paid around 20 euros to Telefónica and barely called, with the classic line maintenance fee acting as a fixed tax. She now pays 12.01 euros with 3,000 minutes included, some 50 hours of conversation, and the cordless handset comes free. Another user describes a Huawei that "sounds fantastic" with a single drawback: when his mother calls from her landline, the recipient sees a mobile-looking number, although to call her it's enough to dial the usual number.

The product is also sold in a version for the self-employed, with two Panasonic cordless phones connected to a kind of wifi box that holds the SIM card. The same SIM gives two numbers, landline and mobile, with 1,000 minutes to landlines and 5 euros of credit for mobiles, and a fee that drops to 5 euros plus VAT in the second year.

The warnings: 2G, dropouts and tricky cancellations

Against the enthusiasm, scepticism. Some advise against it "completely", and not as consumers but on a professional level: they argue the service runs on a 2G network of an operator that is disinvesting in that technology, with the quality degradation that implies. And they add a practical problem: cancelling is no joke when it comes to headaches. Other messages are more blunt: "Dropouts, dropouts everywhere".

Coverage is the first mandatory check before signing up. The second is compatibility: the service cannot coexist with keeping the original landline, so signing up means giving it up. For anyone who has held a number for decades, porting the landline number is the delicate part of the process.

The savings justify the risk

The balance has two clear sides. On one hand, eliminating the line maintenance fee and paying half for heavy phone use. On the other, a network being phased out, a handset that doesn't allow copying the SIM to a second phone, and a customer service department that inspires little confidence. For an elderly person who wants nothing to do with the internet and whose social life revolves around the handset, the economic calculation outweighs the technical one.

The question left hanging is not whether it works, but for how long. An operator shutting down its 2G network is not thinking about the grandad who calls his sister for two hours every afternoon.