Over the weekend, I made some alterations to my cell service plan and added one of my younger siblings to it. Since they wanted a new phone, I had to upgrade my plan and that, unfortunately, meant that the way that I understood cell phone service plans no longer applied. Instead of just “adding a line” to my existing plan and paying a reduced fee for the additonal line, I basically set up a copy of the plan I upgraded to for my sibling. A complete duplicate of all benefits, fees, costs, and everything. I’m still saving a bit of money thanks to adding them, but I’d have saved the same amount of money just changing my plan from what it was to what it is now, a thing I only put off as long as I did because it wouldn’t save me that much money and I simply did not want to think about it. But, years after my initial offer, as they’ve grown further from our parents, my sibling wanted to leave our parents’ phone plan and join mine, so I had to think about it. And am still thinking about since it will take a while for all of that to settle out (as coverage changes, plans update, new numbers/lines become accessible, and so on), which has gotten me thinking about the role that (cell) phone service plays in our lives. After all, when I was young and learning to use the phone, cell phones weren’t as common as they are now. Cell phones became common while I was in high school and smart phones rose to the fore while I was in college, so I’ve gone from having access to an old rotary phone in my parents’ garage to having a front row seat for the rise of voicemail and then the ultimate takeover of smart phones.

Once upon a time, getting your own separate phone line was a big deal. Which is funny to say like it was a long time ago even though it was a mere thirty or forty years, which really isn’t that long. The additional phone line in a given household was a privilege that became more commonplace as dial-up internet became a thing, died out once it stopped being common, and then returned via the world of cell phones. It was a bit of a hassle, after all, as it required additional wiring sometimes (though some houses started to come with this support built-in, as the various telephone jacks in a house got split into groups), so it wasn’t exactly a common thing at the outset. That kind of actual hardware change was always a laborious undertaking, which kept it from getting too common. But adding someone to a cell phone plan? That takes barely anything: just a new phone and a SIM card (or eSIM). All of which meant that, from the time telephones were invented and more widely available until a couple decades ago, moving away from your home meant getting a new phone line, regardless of whether you were moving your household or leaving a household to start your own. There was no option, unless you continued to share a house with them, to remain attached to the phone service of your parents. You had to get your own and set things up just like setting up billing for electricty or water.

Cell phones changed all that. While there was a period where the societal expectation of leaving your parents’ house (also a relatively recent thing, mostly since World War 2, actually) included getting your own phone plan, that mostly disappeared as the expectation of having a landline also disappeared. After that, when phone numbers stopped being an indication of your location in the world, people just stayed on their parents’ phone plan. It was so cheap, after all, just to add another line. Much cheaper than getting your own phone plan. Sure, you had to share with everyone else on the plan, but even that wasn’t a huge problem unless you used a lot of mobile data (and even that wasn’t always a problem: the early days of wide cell phone adoption featured tons of cell plans with unlimited internet service but limited minutes for calls and quantities for text messages). So you stayed on your parents’s plan, paid the small fee to add a line or maybe a chunk of the total bill, and carried on with your life as usual unless, like me, you needed to remove all of your parents’ ability to control or influence your life before you cut contact with them completely. Which is why, unlike most of my peers, I have my own cell service plan and have had that for almost a decade now. Which means my plan is also old enough to pay a small fee to add a line so long as the additional lines don’t mind sharing my overall data limit.

Now, to upgrade and get my sibling the phone deal they wanted, I had to change to a new plan where each line is basically its own plan. I pay a set amount a month and my sibling will pay the same amount each month. There is no cost-savings from aditional lines. I’m saving ten bucks a month as a result of this change, but only because the new plan is cheaper than my old one (and potentially incompatible with my 8-year-old phone, which wasn’t even a recent model back then), but I would have saved about twenty-five bucks a month if we’d stayed on my old plan. And sure, a lot of the features of the new plan are probably worth it, but not having to deal with all the hassle of phone plan changes and adding a number and so on was worth it for me. I mean, I’m honestly not even sure if there’s even a benefit to my sibling being on my phone plan other than it allowing them to take advantage of some “add a line” deals and my years of customer loyalty (what little that is worth, anyway. Though, I must admit, it’s worth not an insiginificant amount because I’ve just been accruing these rewards for years now and never spent a single one of them). But here we are. I only can suspect that now because I’ve spent the time to change my plan over and there’s no going back to a plan that no longer exists. Which feels silly, to be quite honest. We don’t have a phone plan with two separate lines, we’ve got two separate phone plans with a single bill. So now, thanks to the structure of these cell service plans, we’re back to a world where even getting added to your parent’s doesn’t really benefit you. You might as well just get your own line now, unless they have an old plan.