How to get an iPhone for $10 a month:

Telus home service: $40/month.
Telus Mobility iPhone service: $50/month.

Port home number to iPhone, shut it down.
But... how to use iPhone for home number with three floors in house and multiple people?

Answer: Phonelabs Dock'n'Talk with bluetooth module. Plugs into a telephone outlet, pair with iPhone, and now all phones work just as before, routing through the Dock'n'Talk to the iPhone. It really is that easy.

So your household phone "line" is entirely reliant on a single cel phone?

Cel service is nowhere near as reliable as wired landline. Among other things, cel service has limited power-failure support while landlines still run on local-station battery banks. Landline service is also essentially immune to overloading while cel service is entirely based on the concept of manageable overload - which gets unmanageable in any emergency. Wired 911 location information and response is also far more reliable and accurate than wireless e911 location.

Although it's becoming more and more common, using a cel or other wireless connection for primary residence phone service is disrecommended by most experts, mostly for safety reasons. YMMV.

I have had for a couple of years now an AT&T phone system that includes a blue tooth connection to both of our cell phones. I really like it as you don’t have to hunt down your cell phone when it rings; you can pick it up from any phone in the house. Cost me about $100.
I don’t know that there is really a difference any more between landline switching and cell phone switching. Landline tends to disburse switches to local areas where cell uses large area switches, but either way an overloaded switch is an overloaded switch. I used to live in the Forest in Northern Cal; when it snowed the power when out, you would lose the phone because you would lose power to the phone itself. You get used to it; you can at least charge the cell in your car.
My landline phone now is an internet phone so I guess I am completely sold.

A late follow-on here that some may find useful:

For many years, we've had a commercial-grade multiline phone system in the house (Panasonic). For a lot of reasons, I don't want to reinstall it in the new house - wiring issues, complexity issues, lack of need for so many lines, etc. (I also want to sell the Panasonic system now to get it out of the house inventory.)

So I did some searching on the current SOTA in home/small business phones, and found the . This sweet little package handles two lines with a wired-handset base unit and can be expanded with up t0 12 cordless extensions. Not only does it handle two wired lines, with separate voicemail for each, but it can be Bluetooth-paired with up to 4 cel phones... and use any two of them as additional lines by simply leaving the cel near the base unit (as in a charger cradle or whatever).

So we now have a conveniently centered base unit with the voicemail etc., and five cordless handsets, all of which can use either wired line OR either of our cel phones. It's the perfect amalgam of wired house phone and cel phone manager - instead of carrying the sole house cordless and my cel around my various construction spots (hammers, saws and my Evo do not mix!) I can carry one cordless handset and handle calls on all four lines. (And at about $40, a handset falling into my coffee, table saw, dog poop or down a drain is "oh, damn" instead of a much longer smoking string of syllables intended to summon dragons.)

I came out of the original "intelligent telephony" industry and saw pretty much everything go past in the cycle of great ideas. I am hard to impress in this respect - but this system impressed me all to hell and back. It's *cheap*, too - about $150 for the base unit with one cordless, and Amazon has additional cordless units right now for $35. So a six-extension, two(four)-line phone system was $288.

AT&T phones are made by Vtech - and Vtech has exactly the same system with a cordless base unit if you don't want even a single wired handset. I prefer at least one wired one, because it can't get lost and will work even if the power goes out.

The 86109 also has many, many features - too many to list, but summaries are online and you can even find the complete manual in PDF for deep research. It's also a DECT-6.0 system, meaning very long range with excellent clarity and high call security.

Recommended even for iPhone users. Will not make you a better person. Works no matter how you hold it.

That is much like what I use: The Uniden TRU8866. Wired base, two lines, as many handsets as I want.

There was some reason at the time I bought it 5 years ago why Uniden was the only candidate meeting my requirements. Few handsets had a mute function, for one. And I also needed a headset jack on each.

No mute button on these but it's easy to put your thumb over the mic hole. It does have HOLD, which serves the same purpose. On the other end of that spectrum, the handsets do a decent job of speakerphoning.

Headset jack, aye, and I think the handsets support BT headsets as well - I know the base does. Amazing how much stuff they've packed into this generation of systems. I've been through maybe five setups in 12 years and this is hands down the most capable and probably the cheapest. The no-brain cel integration is an amazing innovation, and so obvious in retrospect.

ADDENDUM: Yes, it has a mute key. One of the soft keys shows MUTE when a call is active. I should add that one of the things I like about this system, both base and cordless units, is that it has a minimum number of buttons, which are large and easy to to see and use. I had more than one system (and we've all had cell phones) that had 20 or more teeny-tiny buttons labeled in 6 point gray type on shiny black. By using soft keys like most newer cels, the functions are both context-sensitive and easy to use.