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2007 Sees Wireless Spending Outstrip Landlines
prostoalex writes "Each December the Bureau of Labor Statistics prepares a report on telecommunications spending among US households. They analyze the previous year's data, so their most recent release says that in 2006 the average US household spent $542 on their landline, and $524 on their wireless bill. The way the curves are headed, 2007 is likely to become the first year when wireless spending will surpass landline spending. 'To be sure, when corporate cell-phone use is counted, overall U.S. spending surpassed land line spending several years ago, analysts said.'"
I spend $15/month ($9.99+fees and taxes) for my VoIP landline with unlimited in state calling, $15/month for my wifes phone on my folks family share plan and $0 on my cell (provided by work). That adds up to a grand total of $360 for total communications budget. My company also picks up my internet. I guess the telcos must dislike people like me, which is great because the feeling is mutual =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Didn't know you could still get those.
um...duh?
landlines don't give you varying costs, usage limitations, texting plans, ringtones, MP3s, games, yadda yadda yadda. all landlines do is let you talk/fax.
of course mobile phone spending is gonna outstrip it. the real question to me is why did it take this long?
ed
I don't even have a landline. The only hours that I'm home, are the hours when nobody would call. That said, I _hate_ speculative articles like these. This is not news, it's speculation. That's what these idiots are for.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It's not surprising, wires seem so 90's when I stop to look at my wireless network, home phone, printer, 5.1 surround sound speakers (yeah it is cool) Won't be long till wireless power is an everyday thing.
I reached a point three years ago where the only calls I got on my landline any more were telemarketers.
So I cancelled it and went to a $55 a month plan with rollover minutes. I finally exceeded that in August ($127! Ouchee!) and had to go to a $65 a month plan.
I recently got a $16 a month AT&T line just so I could find my phone when I lose it tho. I leave the ringer off and it is good for 25 outgoing calls. If i get a call when I am off plan that looks like it will be long, I take the call on the land line. This is helpful during the holidays when I am off a lot during off-plan hours.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The suggestion here is that people use their wireless phones more, and while that's still true for some demographics, I think the demographics that don't still outnumber those that do. If you want to see the real reason, look at the price packages that cell companies offer. Most contracted plans start at $40 and people usually choose higher priced plans with extras because they're so afraid of overages.
I don't get it.
landline plans start at around 15 USD a month, cell phone plans start at what, 39 USD? So, total dollars spent is meaningless except as a metric for potential businesses to see how much money they can make. It's similar to comparing box office dollar amounts between years -- if the ticket prices is higher in one year than the other, then total dollar comparisons don't reveal anything about usage. A better metric would be the number of land line accounts vs. cell phone accounts
I have not had a land line sense college. The only reason I really had one then was because the dorm had one in it and I didn't have to pay for it. I have always used my cell phone for everything. It is just too convenient. I don't know why anyone would even need a land line if they did not need to fax something to someone (which can be done via the internet for a fee). I cant believe that it has taken this long either. I would have figured that when every member of a family has a cell phone the bill for that would far outweigh the bill for the land line. Ah well, its cool to see us all going wireless.
Does land-line include cable (Optimum Voice, Vonage, etc.)? I still want to have a land-line, but I'm tired of paying Verizon $90 a month. I plan on switching to Optimum Voice so I can consolidate my bills and save some cash.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The McLuhan inversion of the cellphone is "the tether" and I intensely dislike being at everyone's beck and call, and PAYING for the "privilege", I ditched the cell.
If you want me - land line at either my home or office. If it's less urgent, then email me. If it requires instant attention and I'm on the clock, then IM me. If I'm not responding, instantly, then perhaps I'm TAKING A SHIT AND WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE.
A cell is no guarantee of access anyway - when I did have it, it was usually turned off.
Then there's the downside. My brother ditched landline for cell. We have a conversation. He walks to the otherside of his apartment and he gets dropped. Last night I call a friend who also ditched landline. The conversation w nt som t ng li e th s. Garbage. I was able to get enough to him to tell him to email me with his questions, oh, and ditch the fucking cellphone.
with my landline, I have infinite long distance all over north america. I have DSL and web hosting rolled into it, and with my "extra services" I think I pay around CDN$100 a month.
And I'm a lot happier being "less accessible".
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The only landline phone I have is in the office at work, so thankfully I don't have to pay for it. I'd have to look on the phone to tell you the number, though (then again, I don't know my own cell phone number, either, but that's a different story, as I never call it ;-). I use my cell phone for everything, and inter-office communication is done by email or direct face-to-face contact.
It won't be long before the actual subscriber numbers mirror this (if they aren't already). I have a number of friends that live in Beijing now (and I occasionally do too) and the VAST majority of them don't even have a land line. People are quite happy to rely on their mobile phone. Recent government stats in China show land line subscribers falling for the first time in the last few months while mobile numbers are still accelerating upwards. I'll likely do the same (punt the landline) at my US residence this year too. My only "hard link" to the world will be the cablemodem so I can enjoy relatively cheap broadband. If the mobile carriers ever figure out how to offer reliable high bandwidth data access, I'll lose the cablemodem too.
It will be nice to save a little money, but even nicer to be able to pick up and move around without dealing with number portability, billing hassles, changing equipment, etc.
Cheers,
On the one hand, you have to make and receive all your phone calls from the same place, but on the other hand you get to decide elections. They say one vote can't make a difference, but that doesn't apply to election polls where there's only five landline-owners left to poll and the other four are 90 year olds planning on voting for Roosevelt.
I think this has been true in the developed world for a long time. Second tier tech countries like the USA are just now starting to emulate the rest of the world.
I bought a job lot just after the first Gulf War, haven't spent a penny on them in years...
Brocklesby Park Cricket Club
to hell with sbc/ameritech/whatever they call themselves. their service was crappy, their rates too high, and now that i'm paying $200/month to f*ckin' t-mobile, there's no money left for a landline.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It used to be that most households had one phone line. For a little while during the dialup ISP era, there were some homes that had two phone lines. Our household got rid of the second phone line long ago when we got broadband cable. We are now back to one land line, that is used mostly for conference calls, many of which are REALLY long, and my partner and I each have a cell phone. I also have an employer provided Crackberry.
The landline is a basic unlimited local phone line and other than toll free calls we don't place long distance calls on it. We each have very basic $30 a month plans that include 500 anytime minutes, free after 7 PM, and unlimited data. So, for about $90 a month we get three phone lines; two of which, for us, includes essentially unlimited free long distance. I can remember paying more than $90 a month for a single land line and long distance charges.
For now, we will not give up our land line and corded phones. A few years ago we found out how long cell phone service and broadband cable service lasts after the power goes out -- it is less than a few hours. During a three day power outage we had the only working telephone in our condo building; some people only had cell phones and the ones who had land lines only had cordless phones. We had neighbors who wouldn't even say 'hi' before the power outage all of a sudden feel a need to get to know us -- and our phone. After about the first day, we also had people come by asking me if I could make their useless, and now dying, cordless phone stop beeping.
The only folks I know that still have a land line are people who have kids old enough to use the phone but too young for a cell phone, or people who live in places without service by accident of geography. 'Cell' service is (slowly) improving. I no longer have to walk up to the street to use my phone at my folks house in hilly Pittsburgh. I reckon before long personal land lines will be like Barney DVDs, something that disappears from the home when the kids get old enough.
To be sure, when corporate cell-phone use is counted, overall U.S. spending surpassed land line spending several years ago, analysts said
What about when corporate landline use is counted?
I would think corporate land-line would be far more than corporate cell use.
Also think about the number of international & interstate conference calls happening
through land lines.
I originally misread the title of this. I thought it said: "2007 Sees Wireless Spending Outstrip Landmines". I was like, "Hmm, that sounds interesting...". You can imagine my disappointment after discovering it was about Landlines. YAWWWNNNNN...
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will cramp his style. -- Steven Brust
I wonder how they counted VoIP services. As a landline?
The share of VoIP is substantial in Ontario, to the point where Bell Canada has to run landline commercials and is offering their own VoIP "home phone".
No landline at home: 0$
Cellphone bill: Greater than my landline spending.
Yup. TFA is correct.
ps- It is great to not have the phone ring at some inopportune time with a telemarketer, especially when they are calling to offer me a home loan BECAUSE I JUST GOT A NEW HOME LOAN.
Sorry, different rant.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm proud that my initial iPhone bills will contribute to this effort. AT&T FTW!
Social media and technology thoughts: http://jasonkinner.wordpress.com
The choice of cable vs DSL is clear as day here. The ma-and-pa local cable company isn't cheap has a strict download cap. Past it, they charge like hell per MB. Plus, I have no interest in cable TV (particularly when the most-basic TV plan is $630 a year after taxes... hell no). DSL is pretty reasonably priced.
As such, I need a landline for my DSL. I actually use it a fair bit. I trimmed it as much as possible (there was a fee to have a long-distance provider... I finally convinced them I wanted no long distance ability at all).
For cellphones, I average about $120 a year of spending on Tracfone. I don't even use the 800 minutes a year that gives me. I know 15c/minute sounds bad, but a normal plan is, what, $450 or $500 a year after taxes? With the Tracfone, I get unlimited incoming SMS, including email->SMS. This, I use as a "server is down" automated pager.
And, I pay for Skype unlimited.
So, my annual pay for phones (including some mobility, and all the long-distance I want) and sorta-broadband internet is $660 a year including taxes. And, no cable TV bill. Could be worse.
About a decade ago now, I cancelled my landline service when the first dual-band cell phones came out. Being in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area, coverage was pretty decent although there were pockets of poor signal strength. Overall, though, it was more than good enough for my purposes 99% of the time even given how mobile I am, traveling around to conferences around the country. I did have a a few arguments with some businesses a decade ago where they couldn't comprehend how someone would not have a "home phone" and that I only carried a cell phone. I argued with my neighborhood pizza place that recognized the phone prefix as not being a "home phone" -- the prefix was a dead give-away as a cell phone at the time (they wouldn't take orders from cell phones due to prank cell calls). Even that and arguments with my bank, though, were resolved easily enough once I convinced them that I was absolutely serious.
My reasoning for dropping the landline was simple. If I want to talk to someone, it makes sense to call a *person* and not a *location*. It makes no sense to me to call a location when you're looking for a person unless you know you can't call them directly or you are absolutely sure where they are at. So by only having a cell phone, my friends and family could call me and know that, if I answered, they would be talking to me. If I didn't answer, I was either not available or simply not interested in talking to them at that time. Even with only a cell phone, the phone is primarily for *my* convenience, not the convenience of others (and I expect no differently of others unless it's a business). I find it absurd that some people feel compelled to answer their phone when it inconveniences them.
The last point to share was that the phone was a good one (and damn expensive). A lot of my friends in the same area had utterly *horrible* reception primarily because they bought crap phones or even accepted the "free" ones that were comp'd with the service. I think it's still just as true today and a reason why a lot of people haven't yet converted or don't like dealing with cell phones. You get what you pay for and too many people pay more attention to the short term up-front cost than the long term maintenance and reliability. Get the high-end phone.
Save yourself the money on the landline. Buy the best cell phone you can find. Spend more quality time with them in person.
FWIW, the telemarketing calls stopped almost instantly. Took five years before I got a single telemarketer call and by then I knew exactly who gave out my number (Comcast) and they got an earful in return. None since.
Cheers!
Sean
I'm actually surprised by this since I pay way more for my landline than cell phone. The PUC has made Verizon offer landlines at low cost, and Verizon has retaliated by making it nearly impossible to sign up. At first I just used my cellphone, but sometimes I would miss calls or get poor signal so I decided to get a landline. Well after two weeks of inaction from Verizon I finally called another company, who was happy to have me as a customer...for twice as much money. I ended up paying almost $50 a month for service. I was so pissed I nearly filed a complaint with the public utilities commission, but I didn't really have the time to follow through on it.
Really.
Talk about a wet dream for telephony companies. Getting people to pay for the minutest they use. Getting people to pay for ring tones and the like. Getting people to pay for stuff they can generically access with a simple internet connection and then get them to pay MORE. Better yet, get them to pay for multiple phones for one family.
Worse, there are people who think this has improved their lives. More money tossed out the door. Sorry, but life hasn't changed, people still get by just fine without being available to others 24x7. However marketing people did wonders and suddenly many people not only feel as if they cannot live without a cell phone but they actually feel entitled to them and some go so far as to think others are entitled to them as well... as in that the government should supply those cannot afford them!
Laughable. Keep paying for it guys. I have a pay per minute plan, I normally spend around SEVEN dollars a month at most. Suddenly I am 300 to 500 dollars richer than my friends and I still am in contact with all of them, just in a more sensible method.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I wonder how long it will be before cellphone infrastructure is no longer overwhelmed every time there is a natural disaster / large accident / local news story.
Right now it is essentially a critical piece of infrastructure that is the first thing to become unavailable in a disaster. And while land lines allow some people's call to get through even when the switch is overwhelmed, a cell tower tends to let no one through when overwhelmed so the backlog of people wanting to get through never gets any better.
Seems like a recipe for disaster to me.
Reading about the recent disasters I noticed in several stories there was no cell coverage available in the wake of the disaster. I wonder how long it will be before additional bandwidth for emergencies will be legislated.
Landlines don't stop working when there's a power outage. A lot of cell systems don't have back-up power on their towers.
http://lynxcache.com/The_Associated_Press_Cell_Phone_Spending_Surpasses_Land_Lines.html