My parents don't have landline phone service. Just cell phones. So they'd have to buy landline service and pay to have a hole drilled in the wall for the landline cable and pay the phone co. to drive to their little town and blah blah blah.
Wanting a kid (or our parents) to play with the new toy you bought them just cuz you think they'd really love to get the daily letters and photographs, well, ya gotta look at whether they'll really USE it, like your own elderelative, there, whether they WANT to set up landline service, whether they want to find a PLACE for this typewriter-sized device.
My parents literally have nowhere to put the thing even if they did get landline service--which they won't.
Someone ought to be telling people who want to buy one that the recipient has to have a landline-not just a cell phone.

Personally (and I am not trying to be mean here arky2), I would wonder why anyone would think that an internet based device would work off of a cell phone in a home anyway.

How were you expecting to connect the machine to the internet? Did you think you could just connect with a mini usb cable and use the cell phone as a modem for the presto? It's not like they are going to leave their cell phone tethered to the machine so it can dial out whenever it is scheduled to check for messages.

I would expect to have to use some kind of a wall jack for any device of that nature (with the possible exception of thinking I could hook into a wireless network via a wireless card - but how likely is that to exist for someone who only has cell phones instead of a landline or even in general with this demographic - although we happen to have one at my mom's house for visitors)?

Personally, I wouldn't get this Presto service for an elderly person because of the comments above. My mother had two Presto printers and neither worked for very long. Always out of paper, jamming, the cord outlet in the back of the printer not sturdy, so that one broke. You would think that when they sent you a new printer (I wonder if it was really a new printer) that there would be another year warranty on the new one. Not so! We were told in less than a year we would have to buy another printer. Three strikes and you're out. We were also promised in the beginning that they would not increase our yearly fees, as we signed up early on. Ha, ha. First year, guess what, they increased the fees. So I'm saving my money.

Bottom line: I wouldn't even spend the money to get it shipped.