Listen to this: Phone calls are making a comeback
Alyssa MacKenzie, 32, rarely used her smartphone to make phone calls, apart from the occasional conversation for her work as a disability rights advocate. But when the lockdown for the coronavirus set in, MacKenzie could no longer pop by her mother’s house a few minutes away in New Canaan, Conn. So she has called her many times a day, including once recently to get a recipe for pasta e fagioli.
A couple of hours later, she said, they were still talking.
“We started with the recipe, then talked about my younger brother, then my work, then her day, and next thing I knew, the soup was done,” MacKenzie said. “I needed to hear the familiarity of her voice.”
Phone calls have made a comeback in the pandemic. While the nation’s biggest telecommunications providers prepared for a huge shift toward more internet use from home, what they didn’t expect was an even greater surge in plain old voice calls, a medium that had been going out of fashion for years.
Verizon said it was handling an average of 800 million wireless calls per day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest calling days of the year. Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33% from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said the number of cellular calls had risen 35% and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.
In contrast, internet traffic is up 20% to 25% from typical daily patterns, AT&T and Verizon said.
The rise is stunning given how voice calls have long been on the decline. About 90 million households in the United States have ceased using landline phones since 2000, according to USTelecom.
Wireless calls have replaced much of that activity, but the volume of minutes spent on calls hasn’t changed much over the past decade as people turned to texting and to apps such as FaceTime and WhatsApp, according to wireless carriers and analysts.
New needs are emerging in the crisis.
“We’ve become a nation that calls like never before,” said Jessica Rosenworcel, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that oversees phone, television and internet providers. “We are craving a human voice.”
Although phone calls are now made through cell towers, the appeal of talking hasn’t changed much from the earliest telephone days of the late 1800s.
In Albany, La., the priests and deacons of St. Margaret Queen of Scotland Catholic Church recently divided up a list of 900 parishioners to call to check in on them, something they never did because they saw their members in person.
Some of the congregants in the rural community outside New Orleans were suspicious when they answered unfamiliar numbers.
But Brad Doyle, the associate priest, said they eased up when he began to speak. They talked about their daily routines and said they missed Sunday service, especially before Easter. One congregant went into great detail about the Netflix documentary “Tiger King.” Many wanted to just hear a prayer, he said.
Grace McClellan, 32, a high school teacher in Charleston, S.C., has also turned to phone calls as an antidote to the loneliness of living apart from family and friends. She has begun synchronizing a daily walk-and-talk with her best friend, who lives in Connecticut. With her friend’s voice piping through her earbuds, “it feels as close as possible to a real walk together,” McClellan said.
The return of the voice call is a throwback for telecom companies. For years, Verizon, CenturyLink and AT&T have retired copper wire phone lines that were introduced 150 years ago.
The companies have instead invested in broadband networks and expanding capacity for things such as higher-resolution video and video gaming. They also beefed up their networks to handle nextgeneration wireless technology, called 5G, which will allow people to download a movie in seconds and may spur a wave of driverless car technology and robotics.
“For years, we’ve seen a steady decline in the amount of time people spend talking to one another, especially on wireless devices,” Kyle Malady, Verizon’s chief technology officer, said in a statement. “The move to staying at home has reignited people’s hunger to stay connected, voice to voice.”
The surge in voice calls is for business and personal purposes, said Chris Sambar, AT&T’s executive vice president of technology and operations. Before the spread of the coronavirus led to stay-at-home orders, wireless calls typically peaked in the morning and evening rush hours. Once people got to their offices and schools, the call volumes fell.
Now, he said, voice calls are high throughout the day. While Zoom and Google Hangouts are a popular replacement for meetings with multiple colleagues, the phone is easier for one-on-one conversations. On weekends, phone traffic is also much higher than normal.
“Voice is the new killer app,” Sambar said. “It’s been a real surprise.”