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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.
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.
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.
Do you really think that Joe CrackHead would stop to think whether phones are still in use before he stripped and sold them? "Oh no, I better not steal these wires to support my habit; someone might still talking to their mother on them. I should wait until I receive official notice that they're no longer in use before I resort to my plan of thievery!"
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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.
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.