Will landlines go the way of the rotary phone? Well, in many cases, the trend has already started as more and more consumers ditch the landline and opt to use their smartphones and cellphones as their primary point of contact, according to a new study.
The latest data was compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that four out of 10 United States households use mobile phones and have ditched their old home phones. This is twice the rate from just five years ago, but the speed of getting rid of landlines has slowed down in recent times.
For the past decade, the CDC has been monitoring this trend and concluded that the number of households using cellphones had increased by five percent each year, except last year when it only inched higher by three percent.
No one really understands why this trend has trailed off. Stephen Blumberg, lead researcher of the CDC study, told the Associated Press that he speculates it’s due to households keeping landlines because it’s included in their cable television and Internet package. Another possible factor is that the market has already hit the top limit of people willing to completely forgo landlines.
The CDC reported other interesting findings:
- Three percent of homes have no cellphones or landlines
- Youth are leading the pack when it comes to only having a cellphone
- Poorer adults are likelier to have only cellphones compared to affluent adults
- Forty-four percent of Midwesterners only have cellphones, while just one-quarter of the northeast have cellphone-only homes.
- Men are likelier to give up their landlines than women
As the consumer heads to their mobile devices to answer the call, a growing number of telephone companies are abandoning landlines and replacing phones with wireless alternatives. Verizon started the move and now AT&T and others have acknowledged that they want to follow the same route.
This means that telephone companies will transition from copper wiring to cable TV and fiber optic wiring. Only about one-quarter of American households will maintain a copper phone line, but AT&T has stated that it wants to eliminate the copper wire entirely. This spells bad news for some people and areas of the country, such as rural communities and the elderly, that rely on copper wiring.
If landlines disappear in favor of wireless phones then what happens in the event of a disaster? When an emergency happens, the landline can always reach 911 emergency services, but the same can’t be said with wireless systems.
“This is a real concern is if you’re trying to dial 911,” said Michael Dellomo, an associate director of the
University of Maryland’s masters program in Telecommunications, in an interview with Popular Mechanics. “You’re not gonna have a frequency available for every user in the network. There’s not enough spectrum in the world for that. What happens if everybody has a crisis? When Sept. 11 happened, the cellphones crashed because everyone in the city had a crisis.”
With storms frequenting shore towns, experts, like Jeff Abramo, Communications Director of AARP New Jersey say that they still need landlines.
