I would never give up my land based phone line (or cellular)
and rely on Skype in the Caribbean.

I was referring to him having a landline telephone in the USA.
There's no reason to have one in the states any more. I've talked
several overconnected friends out of their "Landline Ripoff and
Spammer Connection" in the past year. Now connected to cable
broadband, the don't

There's a very good reason to have a land line here in the USofA:
reliability.

I gave up my land line a year and a half ago and went with Vonage over
my cable internet connection. Vonage is ok, but my cable internet
connection is very flakey. This week it is embarrassing me. Cable
internet is dropping out for a minute, two, several, 15 minutes at a
time. One of my lines is a fax line and I'm in the midst of business
dealings with faxes coming and going. People are having to resend at
least half of the time. And when the connection is down they get a
recording that my phone is not in service. Now I could set that fax line
to fwd to voicemail when the connection is lost, but that doesn't get me
the faxes I need. I could use an internet fax service, but then I still
need to get out on the net and get the fax. Telling people to resend,
and again, or to wait 15 minutes and try again, really sux.

I had landline in this area - a major suburb or a major city - for 20
years and do not recall a single day I did not have TelCo service. I had
DSL on that landline for 6 years and recall only 2 or 3 days when it
went down, and then for short times. Now I loathe "the telephone
company" but they were _there_. But my local cable tv & internet
service... don't make me laugh. (Especially this week when I look like
the dummy in the tv commercial that tried to save money on shipping
instead of using FedEx.) I've already called to set up a new landline
account.