ShareThisBy RYAN KIM
San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Not so many years ago, the cell phone was considered a luxury item while the landline was standard in every household.
My, how times have changed.
Today, the cell phone is regarded as a necessity by a growing number of Americans -- especially the young and the poor -- while the residential phone is becoming optional.
The trend, according to a new survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is not limited to just one or two demographic groups but is slowly expanding to include all age and income groups.
According to the survey of 13,056 households across the nation, 29.1 percent of people ages 25 to 29 and 25.2 percent of respondents ages 18 to 24 have abandoned residential phones and rely solely on cell phones.
Among poor households, more than 1 in 5 (22.4 percent) have dropped landlines, about twice the rate of other respondents.
The survey says 12.8 percent of households rely solely on cell phones for communication, up from 3.2 percent in the beginning of 2003, when the semi-annual survey began.
"Young renters are the most likely to go completely wireless. They were the first to do this early this decade and their trend line is at the top," said Stephen Blumberg, author of the report and a senior scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics. "But we're seeing this in every demographic group."
Among the highlights:
-- Latinos, at 15.3 percent, were the most likely of ethnic groups to sever their landline and rely on cell phones exclusively.
-- Fifty-four percent of unrelated adults with no children went without a landline compared with 10.5 percent of adults with children.
-- Renters (26.4 percent) were more likely than homeowners (5.8 percent) to use wireless.
-- Overall, 15.8 percent of households did not own a landline.
Surveyors visited every household in the study, which began asking questions about cell-phone use in 2003.
It's probably too early to write an epitaph for the landline, but the popularity of the venerable landline peaked in 2000 with 192 million subscribers. Since then, the number of phone customers has steadily decreased to 175 million in 2005, according to the FCC. At the same time, cell-phone use has surged from 109 million wireless subscribers in 2000 to 233 million at the end of last year.
James Benton, 30, a Menlo Park, Calif., church administrator, has been part of the migration of largely young users away from landlines. Six years ago, he gave up his landline for good after buying his first cell phone.
He came out of college thinking he would always maintain a landline, just like his parents. But when he began working long hours and moving from place to place, he abandoned the idea and embraced the cell phone.
"I thought a cell phone would make life more complicated, but moving around and working more and more, I wasn't home as much, so the home phone became just an extra expense that I didn't need anymore," said Benton. "I'm not surprised by the trend, though. We all have cell phones. We hardly call each other on landlines anymore."
But Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research, said there are reasons many resist. Many people he surveyed said they want a landline for its better reliability and call quality and its performance in an emergency.
(E-mail Ryan Kim a rkim(at)sfchronicle.com. For more stories or to comment, visit scrippsnews.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
