Xfinity Landline Phones for Seniors: 2024 Review and Pricing

Xfinity Landline Pros and Cons

Xfinity Landline Plans and Pricing

Xfinity offers one home phone plan: Xfinity Voice Premier. This plan costs $20 per month and includes unlimited nationwide calling, as well as unlimited calls to over 90 countries.

The caveat to this low price is that Xfinity's home phone service requires an existing internet connection to function. In theory, you could use any internet connection for this service to work. However, the best deal would be to use an Xfinity internet connection, thereby mitigating the need to purchase a new modem or router.

Xfinity Landline Plan for Seniors

Currently, Xfinity does not offer a specific home phone or landline plan for seniors. There are no age qualifications for Xfinity landlines.

Our Experience With Xfinity Voice Premier

To add a home phone to our account, we logged into our account on the Xfinity website and added home phone service for $20 a month. As mentioned above, this plan included unlimited calling nationwide plus international calling to more than 90 countries. But, surprisingly, despite our internet being very fast at 800 Mbps, the website said we had to replace our existing Xfinity wireless gateway for a faster one.

We could’ve bought our own compatible modem and router, but these require hundreds of dollars upfront. Instead, we decided to rent one from Xfinity for an extra $25 a month and return our old gateway within 10 days to avoid being charged. However, if you have a modem and router that are fast enough, you can avoid this fee altogether.

After skipping past offers for streaming, we decided to get a new phone number and buy a backup battery for an additional $65. This way, our home phone would stay on during a power outage. Note that if you want to transfer a number from an existing phone account, Xfinity doesn’t have to be the provider. Rather, there are many options: the major players like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and a slew of other MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) like Cricket Wireless, CenturyLink, and Tracfone.

We got our package in the mail only three days after clicking purchase — though we also could have picked it up at our local Xfinity store. The package included the phone itself, our new-and-improved gateway, a coax cable, a power cord, and an Ethernet cable if we wanted to use Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. We’re Wi-Fi all the way, though! We already had the Xfinity app downloaded, so we opened it and had it tell us step-by-step what to do.

First, we placed our gateway in front of the cable outlet under our desk. Then, we connected our coax cable to the gateway and then to the cable outlet. Next, we connected the power cord to the gateway and then to the electrical outlet. Finally, we connected the phone to the gateway called “Tel 1” using a telephone cord, which we had to purchase separately.

It took about 20 minutes for the gateway to boot up and change from blinking yellow and green to solid white. Once it was solid white for a minute, we connected the gateway to Wi-Fi and activated our internet on xfinity.com/activate — setting up our new Wi-Fi network and verifying our account. From there, we made a few test phone calls and found that the quality was clear; in fact, it was much clearer than on our old, traditional landlines.

From there, we enjoyed using our Xfinity phone while cozy at home. We set it up to block spam calls, transfer calls to our cell phones while away, and read our voicemails instead of listening to them. Plus, we set it up so if we made a call to 911 using our home phone, the emergency dispatchers would already have our address — meaning quicker service in an emergency. Altogether, we didn’t have any issues with the phone, even during a power outage, thanks to the battery backup.

Xfinity Landline Pricing, Contracts, and Fees

Xfinity’s home phone service costs $20 a month — added to an internet plan that ranges from $73 to $105 a month. We also bought the backup battery for $65, a one-time fee, and added the rental of the gateway for $25 a month. That brought our home phone charges from $20 to $45 a month. If we would’ve added international calling to over 90 countries, Xfinity would have charged us an additional $20 a month. The good news is that, because we bundled home phone and internet, Xfinity gave us a $20 monthly multi-product discount, which could cover the cost of international calling.

But it wasn’t until right before we hit “purchase” that we learned of taxes, charges, and fees, which total $11.95 a month. Altogether, you can pay anywhere from just $20 a month for your home phone service all the way up to $56.95 a month; the latter price includes the gateway, international calling, taxes, charges, and fees, which accounts for the $20 per month multi-product discount.

The charges were all monthly, which meant that our bill could go up the next month. There was no limit on how many calls we could make or our overall talktime, however. So, this is a good price if you don’t have a cell phone or simply prefer using a landline while you’re home.

Xfinity Landline vs. AT&T Landline

AT&T’s landline is a digital home phone like Xfinity’s — tied to your internet plan. The best way to choose between them is to look at which bundling options would be best for you. If you already pay for Xfinity internet, for example, it would be relatively cheap to add a landline to your plan.

Since hidden fees and overages can add up, you should look at the fine print of both plans to see what you’ll be responsible for. It could determine which plan you ultimately choose. However, as far as the home phone plans themselves go, Xfinity is much cheaper by more than half.