Verizon is promising customers the best of both worlds with the rollout of a new service that lets customers turn their home phone into a cell phone. Dubbed Home Phone Connect, NetworkWorld reports that the service essentially lets users make calls with a regular phone over the carrier’s network.

At a cost of $10 a month for current Verizon mobile subscribers, Home Phone Connect is available in select regions of New York and Connecticut and for a limited time only. Customers need only plug their standard phones into a wireless, AC-powered base station supplied by the carrier, which then connects to Verizon’s cellular voice network, reports NetworkWorld.

According to Verizon’s customer support page, Home Phone Connect supports a variety of features including Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Caller ID, International Dialing, 3-Way Calling, Basic Voice Mail (*86), Account Balance (*225), Device Provisioning, (*228), account payment (#786), 411, 611, 911, Last Number Callback (*69) and Nat’l  Domestic Hope Line (#4673), N11,* and # codes are supported in states where VZW supports these features. And the product comes with a 1-year manufacturer warranty from the manufacturer. 

Only time will tell whether Verizon’s efforts to preserve a dwindling demographic will be successful. The Centers for Disease Control reports that one-fourth of American homes now have no traditional landline even though they do have mobile phone service, while only 15 percent have a landline with no cell phone. In 2006, the CDC reported that 11 percent of homes only had a mobile number. In just three years, that number more than doubled to 23 percent in 2009. What’s more, the CDC reported that 60 percent of households still had both landline and mobile service.

Interestingly enough, the CDC’s findings indicate that socio-economic factors can have an enormous impact on whether individuals choose to go with a landline or wireless connection. The CDC reports that more than three in five adults living only with unrelated adult roommates (60.6 percent) were in households with only wireless telephones. And nearly two in five adults renting their home (39.2 percent) had only wireless telephones. Adults renting their home were more likely than adults owning their home (9.9 percent) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.