It’s happening slowly, but the landline phone looks to be on the way to becoming an anachronism:
WASHINGTON - For nearly three in 10 households, don’t even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.
The federal figures, released Wednesday, showed that reliance on cells is continuing to rise at the expense of wired telephones. In the second half of last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones, while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly all their calls on their cells.
The number of wireless-only households grew by 2 percent since the first half of last year. Underscoring the rapid growth, in early 2004 just 5 percent had only cell phones.
Households with cell phones who rarely if ever use their landlines grew by 1 percent since the first half of last year.
Such families often either have their landline hooked exclusively to a computer or rely so heavily on their cells that they ignore landline calls because they are probably from telephone solicitors, said Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the report.
Count my wife and I among that group of 3 in 10. We got rid of long distance on our landline way back in July 2005 and getting rid of an in-home land line followed not too long after that.
Outside of needing a phone line for Faxes and security systems, there just isn’t any reason for us to have a landline anymore.
And it’s cut down on solicitors and those incredibly annoying pre-Election Day get-out-the-vote phone calls. So, for that reason alone, it is entirely worth it.
Cut the cord America, you have nothing to lose but your useless old phone !
H/T: James Joyner
May 14th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
It’s not so easy for some of us. I live in an area (way below the Beltway) of Albemarle County where there is no cell phone reception.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:05 am
I’m way late with this comment, but my wife and I ditched our landline a while ago. We never used it. We had the cheapest plan you could get and after taxes it was still $35/month. I doubt we made or received anywhere close to 35 calls a month, so it was costing us over $1 for each call.