Cutting the cord

Aug 13th 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO

Cutting the cord
Ever greater numbers of Americans are disconnecting their home telephones, with momentous consequences

MUCH has been made of the precipitous decline of America’s newspapers. According to one much-cited calculation, the country’s last printed newspaper will land on a doorstep sometime in the first quarter of 2043. That is a positively healthy outlook, however, compared with another staple of American life: the home telephone. Telecoms operators are seeing customers abandon landlines at a rate of 700,000 per month. Some analysts now estimate that 25% of households in America rely entirely on mobile phones (or cellphones, as Americans call them)—a share that could double within the next three years. If the decline of the landline continues at its current rate, the last cord will be cut sometime in 2025.

The impact of this trend will be greater than most people realise. It will make life increasingly difficult for telecoms firms, naturally. But it will also hurt all business that require landlines, as bills rise and business models are disrupted. No less seriously, the withering fixed-line network threatens the work of the emergency services, such as the police and fire brigade.

The decline in landline use, which has been under way for several years, has picked up speed in recent months. In the first half of 2005 only 7.3% of households were mobile-only, according to America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which collects such data because it uses landlines for health surveys. By the end of last year the proportion had reached 20.2%—increasing by 2.7 percentage points in the second half of last year alone, the biggest-ever increase (see chart).

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