Cellphones Outnumbering Landlines - Is That Surprising?
by Darla Mack
When I relocated from New York to North Carolina I couldn’t quite understand the zoning in which the landline provider utilized in order to determine local call billing. The town that I live in has the 2 digit exchange of a town thats about 20 minutes away. However, the closest town to my house is 7 miles away in distance. Sprint (now Embarq) is the ONLY phone service provider in Duplin County, so its not like there was an option as to who to chose. But when I realized that I was getting charged for extended local calling (one step below long distance charges) just to call that town that is 7 miles from me, I started to inquire. What I found was that my exchange location was outside of the local calling zone which meant that I was constantly being billed for extended local calls. This meant a monthly bill of over $200. What????
The easiest solution was to just use my cellphone. A decision like that didn’t require much thought and even people in my community only saw the need for a landline to use dial-up on their computers. According to an article on Yahoo News only 3 in 10 household actually have a landline. To me, this isn’t surprising.
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.
Households with cell phones who rarely if ever use their landlines grew by 1 percent since the first half of last year.
Old analog providers made it easy as well by allowing 911 calls to be made, even if cellphone service was inactive.
But was this ever expected?
Also affected are the telephone industry and emergency service providers, who can find it harder to locate people calling from a cell phone.
The survey also found that:
Now, while I don’t completely agree with that above list, I will say that in my opinion using my cellphone instead of a landline is the most cost-efficient method. Especially since you can’t really right the landline companies about their zoning methods. But at the end of the day, a monthly plan of $39.99 beats a monthly bill of $200. And yes many can say that you can still have a landline, just don’t make long distance calls… but why pay the extra money if you don’t have to.
