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America loses its landlines
Cutting the cord
Aug 13th 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition
Ever greater numbers of Americans are disconnecting their home telephones, with momentous
consequences
Alamy
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).
The recession has accelerated cord-cutting, explains Stéphane
Téral, an analyst at Infonetics Research, since people want to save
money and are readier to sacrifice their landlines than their
mobiles. But the problem is particularly acute in America because
of the vastness of the country, which makes fixed-line networks
expensive to run or improve. That, along with upheaval in the
telecoms industry in recent years, has made internet access over
landlines in America annoyingly slow, even in the cities, leaving
landlines much more dispensable than they are in Europe.
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