If the Neighbors Install 20, Consider Topping Them With 35; ‘Baby Needs Internet Access, Too!’
By NANCY D HOLT | The Wall Street Journal | April 17, 1998
Larry Lacerte is a busy man. He’s president and chief executive of his own software firm in Dallas, and father to seven children, ages five to 14. At home, he says “I don’t want everyone having to sit around and wait to make a phone call.
So he has 50 separate phone lines in his house — 30 for business and 20 for family. “All the extra phone lines make things run smoothly,” he says. Besides, he thinks call waiting is rude.”
Once, people wanted an extra pone line for the kids. Then for business. Then for the computer. Then for the fax machine. Then for the kids’ computer. Today, multiple phone lines are becoming the ultimate convenience — or status symbol.
Upscale residential developments and luxury apartment buildings are pitching extra phone lines and “Internet-ready hookups” in their marketing. Multiple phone lines are showing up in tract housing, too. Only unimportant rubes, it appears, can get by with a single phone line.
“We’ve clearly established the barest minimum to be three phone lines: one voice, one computer and one fax,” says Adam R. Rose, a New York developer. “For any busy and productive metropolitan-area person, three lines is just the beginning.” His company is wiring new apartments in Manhattan for six to eight phone lines, which he considers a big lure for young, high-income tenants.
‘It’s Mayhem’
A decade a go, only about 3% of households had more than one line. In 1996, the latest year for which statistics are available, that number had jumped to 16.5%, according to the Federal Communications Commission. In Massachusetts, California and New York, about one in five households now has more than one phone line, says Tracy Waldon, an FCC economist.
Of course, there are drawbacks: phones ringing simultaneously, phones ringing on different floors, remembering a half-dozen different home phone numbers, paying massive bills. And how many phones can you answer at once?
With eight telephone lines snaking to four phones, two fax machines and two modems, Irwin Zalcberg calls his home office “the war room.” But Mr. Zalcberg, a 49-year-old investment consultant in New Buffalo, Mich., isn’t always sure who’s winning. “This setup strains my neck and my back,” he says. “I’m constantly reaching for a phone.”
Three days a week, he has an assistant. But other times, he juggles phones: If he’s on one line, and another rings, he picks it up and listens to both callers at the same time. On occasion, he says, he has been fielding calls on three different phones and had two calls come in on call waiting. “It’s such mayhem,” he says.
Still, he thinks it’s vital to be accessible. “Things change so quickly today that 30 seconds or one minute can change things dramatically,” says Mr. Zalcberg, a former trader on the Chicago Board of Options. In the bigger home he’s building nearby, he is adding five more lines.
The price of all this accessibility varies. Most homes are wired to accommodate two phone lines; if you want the second one turned on, it usually costs you less than $50. But if you want more, you have to install additional wiring at costs from $100 to as much as $1,500, says Helen Heneveld, a home-electronics consultant in Holland, Mich.
A Badge of Honor
Now, some builders are starting to install additional phone lines in the walls of new homes, along with wiring for cable, audio and security systems. As luxuries go, it isn’t outrageously expensive. Claudia Earley, 47, a part-time tutor, paid $500 for upgraded wiring in her new home in Littleton, Colo. It now has five phone lines — and capacity for three more. “Are they necessities? No. But it’s nice to be able to afford them,” she says.
Other people want to be ready for nifty future services that will require extra phone lines. Last year, Bob Wise installed a $3,000 wiring system in his new 4,200-square foot home in San Jose, Calif. Although he now uses only four phone lines for home and business phones, fax and modem, he has capacity for 20.
He has big plans for the other lines: video-on-demand. A centralized home-automation system to control his lighting, security and sprinkler systems — even regulate the temperature in his wine cellar and his pool. And he says his 18-month-old daughter, who already has her own computer, will surely want Internet access and a phone a few years down the road. “I’m a total gadget freak,” he says. “I was a geek before geek was chic.”
For someone who lives and works in Silicon Valley, it’s a badge of honor to have a lot of phone lines. “It’s important for me to be on the forefront of technology,” says Mr. Wise, executive managing partner for USWeb Corp., an Internet-services firm. “This is my business, this is my industry. Carpenters have cool tools, don’t they?”
Even if you don’t use all the lines, it’s nice to know they are there. Mr. Lacerte, the Dallas software executive, doesn’t normally use the 30 lines in his house that he designates for business. But he wants them, he says, in case of an emergency. “Hopefully it would never happen, but if a tornado, fire or power surge caused phones to go down (at his company’s headquarters), we could move 30 bodies to my home and have them answer phones there.”
So that leaves just 20 lines for the family. Five are used for Internet access, two are used for faxes, and one is still waiting for a job. Twelve are used for phones. The first four phone lines ring all throughout the house. Six lines ring only in certain zones of the house. His two teenagers, 13 and 14, each have their own line, which rings only in their bedrooms. “It’s pretty simplistic, really,” Mr. Lacerte says.
The lines are a great convenience, he says, and they promote good manners. “I don’t like call waiting. I don’t want to miss a phone call, but at the same time, I don’t want someone to hold while I talk to someone else.” His five-year-old has learned to take messages, he says, and knows “formal telephone etiquette.”
Shaq’s New Number: 18
In high-end custom homes, wiring for extra phone lines has become a must-have. Ray Coudriet, president of his own building company in Orlando, Fla., puts commercial-quality wiring in most of the homes he builds, which cost upward of $2 million. Recently, he installed a phone system with a 32-line capacity in the 16,000-square-foot home in Windemere, Fla., belonging to Ken Griffey Jr., the Seattle Mariners center fielder. A neighbor, Los Angeles Lakers basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal, has 18 lines in his nearby 24,000-square-foot residence, according to Mr. Coudriet, who also built that home.
But extra phone lines aren’t “just for high-end homes anymore,” says Tom Reiman, president of Broadband Consulting Group Inc. in El Dorado Hills, Calif. “It’s becoming a product that’s important for homes of all price ranges.” Lawrence Doll Co., of Fairfax, Va., which builds houses in the $350,000 to $600,000 price range, recently introduced a wiring package that includes capacity for as many as eight phone lines. Shea Homes, a production homebuilder in Walnut, Calif., offers an upgraded wiring package as an option. Price: $2,000 to $4,000. Denver-based Village Homes of Colorado Inc., another production builder, started out offering extra phone-line-wiring packages as an option on new homes, but last September made it standard. Cheryl Schuette, vice president, estimates that a high-performance wiring system adds as much as $2,000 to the value of a home.
In luxury developments, multiple phone lines are de rigueur. New York City’s Trump Organization is retrofitting condos in Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue for at least six high-speed phone lines for each unit.
Not every resident finds extra lines that useful. Over the last three years, Donald Trump, chairman and chief executive of Trump Organization, has cut back from about 20 phone lines to five in his three-story penthouse atop Trump Tower. How many personal lines does he have there? One. “The way I view it,” he says, “I can only speak with one person at a time.”