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Majority of US Households Now Cellphone-Only, Government Says (networkworld.com)
The National Center for Health Statistics has released a report that says, for the first time in history, U.S. households with landlines are now in the minority. Network World reports: The second 6 months of 2016 was the first time that a majority of American homes had only wireless telephones. Preliminary results from the July-December 2016 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that 50.8% of American homes did not have a landline telephone but did have at least one wireless telephone (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) -- an increase of 2.5 percentage points since the second 6 months of 2015. Young adults (25-34) and those who rent are most likely to live wireless-only, as 70 percent of that demographic lives with a landline.
I still have a landline. I need it so that when I can't find my cellphone, I can call it and search for the ringing sound.
Pretty sure in 1800, the majority of U.S. households did not own a landline telephone.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
There should be at least one person to actually use the cell phones.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What disaster is averted or lessened by having a land line? The cellular network is more likely to be available (or come back online first) in the event of a disaster.
Perhaps where you live, but where I'm at, every time there is a disaster, the cellular network goes down within an hour, as people in the area call their relatives, and exhaust the batteries in the cell towers.
Other than that, I have found that 100 percent of the calls on my soon to be gone land line are scammers.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That depends on the area. In many places, cell towers have as little as 24 hours of backup power. Most COs for POTS lines have a week or more.
The actual copper is often buried where it won't be blown down by storms, unlike a tower.
Can you imagine the amount of copper theft, if thieves knew that a lot of those old copper trunk lines have for the most part been abandoned? Yeah, some old alarm systems and a few older landline phones, but most POTS phones are long gone, leaving most of the copper just hanging there. I know one of the trunk lines in my town is abandoned, because at&t doesn't even bother pumping the liquid nitrogen into the line to dry out the moisture like they use to. They kept a tank on that line for over 15 years but last year they took it off, a few years after they buried fiber in the same footprint under the ground.
Young adults (25-34) and those who rent are most likely to live wireless-only, as 70 percent of that demographic lives with a landline.
If 70 percent of any demographic lives with landline phone service, how can they be most likely to be without landline phone service? Interesting use of statistics, I think.
From the survey:
Landline = "at least one phone inside your home that is
currently working and is not a cell phone.â
This includes a phone via cable internet.
So not POTS. POTS has probably already been a minority for years.
Indeed. And in many cases if they don't offer T.38 (the fax standard over VOIP), they offer an e-mail based Fax gateway that's even easier to use than using a physical machine.
This makes no sense when you can get a VoIP service to do the same for a fraction of the cost.
Or outside the US, a second mobile service. Here I can have a prepaid second mobile with all calls going to voicemail, which is sent as an MMS.
I think I put $20 a year on it to keep it going. A pity you have to pay for incoming calls.
Wow really? A tower blown over by a storm? If that's going on you're not going to care about local cell coverage because you should have evacuated long before that point. Towers don't blow over.
The power issue however is real, but over the years I've lost my POTS connection far more often than my cell phone due to failed ageing equipment, backhoes doing what they do best and ripping through infrastructure, and just plain incompetence from people trying to manage the ratnest of wire that makes up a typical copper phone line connection.
Towers can get knocked down, it depends on the tower and the weather. You can't evacuate for a tornado, for example, but that can certainly take out a cell tower. I've seen cell towers take themselves out due to a battery failure.