• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Still hooked up

The trend of connecting to people rather than places continues:

For nearly three in 10 households, don't even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.

The federal figures, released Wednesday, showed that reliance on cells is continuing to rise at the expense of wired telephones. In the second half of last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones, while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly all their calls on their cells.

The number of wireless-only households grew by 2 percent since the first half of last year. Underscoring the rapid growth, in early 2004 just 5 percent had only cell phones.

I'm almost there. I have cable Internet, so I don't need the "real" phone for that. Every month at bill time, it galls me to pay two phone bills, and I vow to get rid of the land line. But I keep backing down, because there's just something frightening about going completely wireless, like my home might be incomplete, you know? I suspect a lot of old fogies feel that way.

Comments

Doug
Thu, 05/15/2008 - 11:01am

We've consolidated Internet, cable, and telephone through the cable company. Probably saves us a little, but probably not enough to justify the land line. My wife has mentioned having little kids and 911 concerns as reasons to keep a land line. I don't know how precise the 911 locators are for cell phones versus the land line. Mostly I think it is, like you said, that it just doesn't feel right somehow.

Quantcast