Say Goodbye to Landlines

A survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) finds that more than half of Americans either don’t have a landline or don’t use it. Young people were particularly unlikely to have a landline.

TechSpot’s Shawn Knight reported, “Looking at the numbers individually, the CDC discovered that roughly a third of Americans (35.8 percent, to be exact) relied solely on wireless phones for voice communication. 15.9 percent of all homes surveyed had wireless phones and landlines but handled almost all of their calls via mobile phone. Combined, 51.7 percent of US homes either don’t have a landline or don’t use it as their primary phone, an increase of 1.8 percent year over year.”

Nathan Eddy from eWeek added, “For the period Jan.–June 2012, there are four demographic groups in which the majority live in households with only wireless telephones: adults aged 25–34, adults living only with unrelated adult roommates, adults renting their home, and adults living in poverty. The report also found men (35.2 percent) were more likely than women 32.9 percent to be living in households with only wireless telephones, while the proportion of women among all wireless-only adults increased from 47.6 percent to 50.2 percent. Adults with college degrees (21 percent) were more likely to be living in wireless-mostly households than were high school graduates (15.5 percent) or adults with less education (11.9 percent).

GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham added, “The young eschew landlines. Six in 10 adults aged 25–29 (60.1 percent) lived in households with only wireless telephones. That number drops as household members get older.”

SlashGear’s Shane McGlaun noted, “Many people have a home phone solely for Internet connectivity via DSL.”