Landlines a thing of the past but are handy in a cell outage
NEW YORK — When her cellphone’s service went down this week because of an AT&T network outage, Bernice Hudson didn’t panic. She just called the people she wanted to talk to the old-fashioned way — on her landline telephone, the kind she grew up with and refuses to get rid of even though she has a mobile phone.
“Don’t get me wrong, I like cellphones,” Hudson, 60, of Alexandria, Virginia, said Thursday, the day of the outage. “But I’m still old school.”
Having a working landline puts her in select company.
In an increasingly digital United States, they’re more and more a remnant of a time gone by, an anachronism of a now-unfathomable era when leaving your house meant being unavailable to callers.
Although, as Thursday’s outage shows, sometimes they can come in handy.
The San Francisco Fire Department said on social media that people unable to get through to 911 on their mobile devices because of the outage should try using landlines.
In 2024, that’s definitely the exception.
According to the most recent estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics, about 73% of American adults in 2022 lived in households where there were only wireless phones and no landlines, while 25% were in households with both. Barely over 1% had only landlines.
Contrast that to estimates from early 2003, where fewer than 3% of adults lived in wireless-only households, and at least 95% lived in homes with landlines, which have been around since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876.
Twenty years ago, landline phone service was the “bread and butter” for phone companies, said Michael Hodel, a stock analyst at Morningstar Research Services LLC who follows the telecom industry. Now “it’s become an afterthought,” replaced by services like broadband internet access and its multiple ways of making voice contact with others.
In today’s United States, landlines have practically reached the status of urban legend in a nation where connecting over mobiles with the people you want — at the exact moments you want, on the precise platforms you prefer — feels fundamental enough to be a Constitutional right.
Among most age groups, the large majority were wireless-only, except for those 65 and older, the only group where less than half were estimated to only use cellphones.
What drove the change? It was that shift from telephones being mainly for voice communication to becoming tiny, data-saturated computers that were carried around in our pockets, Hodel said.
Of particular significance: the introduction of Apple’s first iPhone in 2007. The rise of the smartphone fundamentally changed people’s relationships with the devices in their pockets.
Despite the outage, which was quickly resolved, Hodel was skeptical at the notion that people would be unsettled enough to bring landlines and additional phone bills back into their lives.