Voice telephone service has finally tipped to predominantly mobile, according to statistics compiled by the federal department of health and human services. The latest survey shows that a bit more than half the homes in the U.S. no longer use landline telephones to make or receive calls…
In the second 6 months of 2016, more than one-half of all households (50.8%) did not have a landline telephone but did have at least one wireless telephone. More than 123 million adults (50.5% of all adults) lived in households with only wireless telephones; over 44 million children (60.7% of all children) lived in households with only wireless telephones. The percentage of households that are wireless-only and the percentages of adults and children living in wireless-only households have been steadily increasing. The observed 2.5-percentage-point increase in the percentage of households that are wireless-only from the second 6 months of 2015 through the second 6 months of 2016 was statistically significant. The 2.8-percentage-point increase for adults and the 3.0-percentage-point increase for children across the same 12-month time period were also significant.
It’s a significant milestone, but it should be read for what it is – a measure of how people make voice calls. It doesn’t say anything in particular about how people access the Internet.
The distinction is important because telephone companies, and AT&T in particular, continue to push lawmakers and regulators to allow them to rip out copper wireline networks and replace them with wireless service. When they make those arguments, they wave statistics like these and claim that people don’t need wired connections anymore, while deliberately distracting them from the facts that 1. many mobile voice-only homes connect to the Internet via wired connections and 2. mobile data is very expensive and slow compared to even legacy DSL technology, particularly in rural and inner city communities.
Voice is migrating to mobile, although there will be demand for landline service, too, for many decades to come. Don’t confuse it with broadband service, which continues to see increasing in-home demand for speed, capacity and reliability that only wired networks can deliver.