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Verizon's updated online safety and digital wellness tools for families include a feature that may only resonate with parents over a certain age: a reboot of the landline concept.
The new Verizon Family Plus, announced Thursday, combines software for parents to monitor kids’ online use and real-world locations and spot and block online scams, among other things. But it also includes Family Line, which Verizon describes as “your home phone reimagined.”
This is an alternate line that will ring on up to five smartphones. Family members can also call from those digits and join a call in progress.
Verizon’s system requirements are fairly lenient, supporting mobile operating systems as old as the 2016-vintage Android 7 and 2022’s iOS 15. But there’s a less obvious limit to Family Line, clarified to us by a Verizon spokesman: You can’t port an existing number to this feature, ruling out a migration from a landline number that’s already in people’s contacts lists to Verizon’s virtualized service.
The number of people with landlines who might want to do that could be larger than you might expect, given the eagerness of telcos to retire copper phone lines that traditionally deliver voice service. The Centers for Disease Control tracks wireless-only use, and in the second half of 2024, it found that almost 21% of adults lived in a residence with a landline.
A Verizon spokesman said that the company will try to provide Family Line numbers in the same area code as a subscriber’s existing line. In the case of an old, near-exhausted area code like DC's 202 or New York’s 917, that may not be possible.
Customers can, however, port a Family Line number out of Verizon to a competing provider, whether it’s another wireless carrier, a VoIP service, or an online-only phone platform like Google Voice.
The other parts of the new Family Plus bundle should be more familiar to Verizon subscribers, since they date to an older digital-parenting bundle previously updated in October 2024.
They also don’t seem to depart that much from the tools you can get from Apple, Google, and third-party vendors. It’s a common practice among telecom firms to provide features like these by whitelabeling other firms' software, but Verizon says it built its bundle in-house.