Census Bureau data shows about 28% of households ditched their landline and now rely exclusively on a cellphone. For households in the 15 to 29 age bracket, the portion doing so is about two-thirds.
That info is reported by the Wall Street Journal – More People Say Goodbye to Their Landlines.
Households with a landline dropped from near 100% in 1998 to 71% in 2011, according to a nice graph in the article. Households with a cellphone increased from 36% in ’98 to 89% in ’11.
That is a lot of change in just 13 years.
Jim, have two comments about this.
First, when I am off away teaching for 9 months at a time, I never install a landline. I rely exclusively on a cell phone.
Second, my wife back home jokes that the only reasons for maintaining a land line are to chat with her favorite telemarketers and to dial up her cell phone when she misplaces it. This makes the land line a very expensive cell phone locator. If someone ever invents an app for locating a missing cell phone, we’ll ditch our land line.
Dave:
Thanks for the comment. Since I can blog about telemarketing calls, the landline will continue to be valuable for blogging fodder if nothing else. Would that make it tax deductible to boot? (Don’t bother answering that!)
Regarding your wife’s cell phone locator service, perhaps she could just get ahold of you and have you call her cell phone. Oh wait….