Landline Holders Increasingly Older, More Affluent 616
netbuzz writes "More than a quarter of the under-30 crowd has decided you only need one telephone — and it sure as heck does not plug into a wall. The trend towards an all-mobile lifestyle is accelerating, according to a new survey. Besides younger people, lower-income people are also more likely to have cut the cord. And while businesses may be a bit slower on the cell-only uptake, there appears to be little doubt at this point that the traditional landline will be joining rotary dials and party lines as a relic of the telecommunications industry."
I'm in that category (Score:4, Informative)
I'm in that category - I own a mobile, but unfortunately, here in Australia, you need to rent a landline from the monopoly PSTN provider (Telstra) if you want to have broadband internet (ADSL anyway).
So I have a landline I never use.
God they're filthy (Telstra) - hopefully we'll have a change of Government soon & get rid of the current spineless Prime Minister John Howard - who can't stand up to Telstra.
Re:Party lines? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Party lines? (Score:3, Informative)
Needless to say this meant that every time you wanted to place a call, you'd risk interrupting your neighbors' conversations. It was cheaper to hook residential phones up this way, but obviously most people preferred to pay a bit more for their own line.
Re:How do you handle guests and extensions? (Score:2, Informative)
Put the phone on speaker.
Yes. Or they can use my cell if they must, but I'd rather they use their cell. That's what I do when I'm a guest, so why should I do otherwise for guests of mine?
Use the interweb. A long time ago, I had a cable box that required a phone line. That requirement was removed soon after. Similarly, my Tivo needed a landline for its very first setup, but everything after that just works over the internet. If I hadn't had a landline when I setup my Tivo, I'd have just taken it to a friend's house and set it up there first.
Re:Party lines? (Score:5, Informative)
A party line is a single telephone line that you share with your neighbors. They were common in rural areas of the U.S. before WWII, probably becuase they were cheaper than dedicated phone lines (remember, back then each line was on a different physical circuit, and calls were switched by human operators).
Re:Bandwidth? (Score:2, Informative)
that's sort of like saying that if blue light stops shining, won't red light get brighter? (not to be condescending)
the phone calls and the dsl signal are handled by completely different machinery inside the central offices.
except for the splitter in the DSLAM that overlays the two signals (at two very different frequency ranges) on the same wire it's all separate. the internet traffic goes through the DSLAM and up/out through a DS3 or OC3, while the plain old phone (POTS) traffic gets directed through the switches where it gets dial tone.
if this doesn make sense, write the newcastle importer to complain.
Re:you don't need phone service on your landline (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Kind of a concern (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting. We had a huge windstorm this past winter. I was without power for a week, and had friends who were without for nearly two. During that entire time, my cell phone continued to work perfectly. I used my car to keep the battery charged.
Your experience prompted you to get a landline. Mine has prompted me to buy a generator, though I'm waiting for a few more months when prices will be the lowest (we don't get power outages here in the summer, since it's not hot enough for people to overload circuits with A/C units). If anything, I came out of the experience with a more favorable impression of cell phones, as there's no way I would've been able to keep my old portable phone charged up that long and I couldn't take that out to my car to charge off the engine.
Re:Kind of a concern (Score:5, Informative)
For me in Aus it's others (Score:3, Informative)
In the US isn't it the case where the receiver pays? It was something like that for txt messages etc when I was over there, thereby making mobile spam horrid as you ended up being charged for receiving spam, whereas here in Aus if they spam you it costs them, not you.
As such, we can't get rid of our landline really...
Re:Land lines makes no sense anymore (Score:2, Informative)
Long distance is cheaper on the land line, even with the flat rate overhead and fees.
What do you get charged for a cell 'phone conference call? How much more is that than the cost of picking up an extension on a land line?
Cell 'phones for emergencies are really, really cheap. Ours are less than $7 USD per month, and we don't even have the prepaid kind.
If there were two- or multi-line cradles into which I could drop cell 'phones at home, then answer an extension, I would be more inclined to even consider going cell-only, but the system would have to accept 'phones from whichever carrier I choose to use AND the 'phones would have to be portable, too. The lock-ins on cell 'phones are at least as obnoxious as anything the "Bell Gang" have done, besides the fact that you're dealing with a "Bell Gang" subsidiary or affiliate with most cell carriers.
Re:Bandwidth? (Score:3, Informative)
Annex I in the ADSL2 and ADSL2+ standards allows the upstream channel* to start start at tone 1 (4.3125 KHz) instead of tone 6 (25.875 KHz). Obviously, you don't get POTS in this mode - it's meant as an all-digital design for telco VOIP roll-out. It doesn't buy you all that much - 15 bits/tone * 5 tones * 4Khz data symbol rate = 260 Kbits/second. That's the theoretical maximum and most likely its going to much less than that since most existing modems weren't designed with this in mind and likely have very poor amplifier performance (if not built in high-pass filters) near the DC range and I don't think the market for it is big enough to convince anybody to spin a chip for this feature.
*- and technically the downstream, too, I think, but there are a myriad of issues with doing that revolving around the massive echo rejection you need and dealing with near-end crosstalk at the DSLAM end, so most ADSL designs that are actually deployed are frequency domain duplex (the upstream and downstream use different frequencies).
Re:For me in Aus it's others (Score:4, Informative)
The only time you pay overcharges is if you exceed your airtime allotment, or you place a long distance call to a place that isn't included. Most plans include the entire US, so any call in the US is considered local. However they generally don't include international calls so you pay per minute for the call, same as you do with a landline. International calls to you are no different than any other, you don't pay anything other than airtime.
The net effect is that so long as you don't exceed your minutes, there tends to be no extra charges over the monthly plan rate.
Not much, (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kind of a concern (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Kind of a concern (Score:4, Informative)
No, outside the US, most mobile phones work on a caller-pays basis, just like landlines.
A lot of people prefer it like this - that way, whoever initiates the service usage pays for it, like most services, as opposed to you being at the mercy of whoever decides to call you a lot (tele-marketers, jerks, but I repeat myself, etc).
For example, I'm on a pay-as-you-go plan here in the UK - I certainly don't want people using up my credit if I don't want them to.
I think the US norm of callee-pays originally stemmed from the inability of the billing system/incumbent networks to cope with the other way, due to various limitations (but I could be wrong; it's been a while since I heard that, and my memory may be faulty).
Re: services are crap (Score:1, Informative)
1) Sodas use High Fructose Corn Syrup, not sugar. Sugar would be a lot better! Also, diet sodas have a HUGE market.
2) Caffeine has a number of beneficial effects on the body.
Re:you don't need phone service on your landline (Score:3, Informative)
In NZ, Telecom (who 'own' the copper network) were saying that it costs them as enormous amount of money to maintain it - when Clear (their major competitor) offered to take this loss making asset off their hands (for a dollar), Telecom refused - I wonder why!
Young people want to save money (Score:1, Informative)
The phone company is actually forcing us to switch over to the more easily maintained cell network because it offers them higher profit margins. That is the REAL driving cause behind the disappearance of land lines.
What about the sun? (Score:5, Informative)
"The last solar maximum [wikipedia.org] was in 2001, and on 10 March 2006 NASA researchers announced that the next cycle would be the strongest since the historic maximum in 1958 in which northern lights could be seen as far south as Mexico."
Aren't we just one or two Coronal Mass Ejections from having all our satellites (and cell service among others) go kerflooey?
Re:Kind of a concern (Score:3, Informative)
If they ever fix the coverage out at our house, we'll think about dropping the land line, but as it is, it's the only 99%+ reliable communications we have, and phone service is considered a life-critical application.
Re:Security Systems (Score:2, Informative)
it hass a cellular transmitter up in my attic.
Re:Kind of a concern (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kind of a concern (Score:3, Informative)
Really crappy that they can get away with this. Fortunatly there is a disconnected phone line going into the house so I might hook that up so 911 calls are possible.
Re:What about the sun? (Score:3, Informative)
Satellites are screwed, but the atmosphere blocks most radiation before it can reach cell phone towers. Anything strong enough to screw them up would also probably fry us.