Home phones on their way to becoming dinosaurs

Among consumers between 18 and 34, 50 per cent have wireless-only households

VANCOUVER – The old home phone may not be going the way of the fax machine yet – but its days could be numbered as more and more consumers ditch their land lines to go wireless.

In 2008, only eight per cent of Canadian households had given up their traditional land line in favour of using only a cellphone.

By 2011, the latest tally from Statistics Canada, that num- ber had grown to 13 per cent of households.

Some 3.6 per cent used cable or voice-over-internet (VOIP) providers for their phone service, with 16 per cent of Canadian households using various combinations of phone services that didn’t include a traditional land line.

The most likely households to be wireless only were those of 18- to 34-year-olds – a demographic in which 50 per cent of households were wireless only.

A study by the Convergence Consulting Group predicts that 26 per cent of Canadian homes will have only wireless phone service by the end of 2014.

“I think you are always going to have room for land lines, but even for people who aren’t replacing their land-line phones with their wireless phones, they are certainly using their wireless phones more,” said Marc Choma, spokesperson for the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA).

“I look at my own kids – there will be a land line sitting in the family room but when they want to call somebody, they use their cellphones.”

Telus, which has its roots as a traditional telephone company, sees that age factor in its customers’ decision to go wireless only.

“What we find is the suite of services people choose changes throughout their lives,” said Telus spokesperson Shawn Hall.

“When someone goes to university, they might just have a cellphone and that’s all the phone service they need but when they get married and have children, that land line becomes really important. ” Telus’s own numbers tell the story of the growth of wireless.

Back in 2000, the year Telus bought the wireless company Clearnet, its wireless and data services accounted for 28 per cent of its revenue and the rest from traditional phone services. By last year, the numbers has switched completely, with 76 per cent of revenue coming from wireless and data, which includes its wireless operations, Optik TV and health care data services.

CWTA records go back to 1985 for wireless subscribers, a year when only 6,000 Canadians had cellphones. It’s expected that in the first quarter of this year, Canada will surpass 26 million wireless subscribers, amounting to 76 per cent of all Canadians. That’s up from 8.7 million in 2000.

The choice isn’t just between wireless phones and land lines.

Today there is a growing number of gadgets and services that bridge the gap between the two – including VOIP – to give consumers a free or inexpensive way to make calls from their home phones.

And Rogers Wireless has come up with its own hybrid solution for lowering wireless bills by switching calls between Wi-fi networks and the cellular networks, all on the same phone.