June 29, 2005

U.S. Adults Abandoning Landlines For Mobile Phones - Yahoo! News

!0% of users have given up landline service in favor of 100% cellular voice. Landline POTS service will continue to decline among the many options for cellular service.

My concern is whether the cellular networks are robust enough to support massive local traffic spikes created in emergencies. Further, are cellular sites all powered with standby generator power for those times when the electric grid fails?

"As young adults age, they are expected to drive the trend further away from landlines. Many 18 to 25 year olds grew up with cellular phones and have less apprehension toward never having a landline, Porus said. Older adults, however, who grew up with landlines, still see them as more reliable than wireless, and therefore important to have during an emergency.
'As (young adults) get older and have households of their own, you're going to see fewer and fewer landlines,' Porus said.
Cable operators have been moving quickly into telecommunications by offering telephone service over a high-speed Internet connection. This has prompted telephone companies to invest in building out the infrastructure for delivering TV over their own broadband products. Both sides are looking to offer consumers telephone, TV and Internet services in one package, called a 'triple play' in the industry.
But trends indicate that Internet telephony may be the weakest link in the package, since it would require a cable connection or landline. Consumers in the future would probably be more interested in cellular-phone service and a wireless Internet connection.
'VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) may be the least valuable, because it's more of a back-up service (to a cellular phone),' Porus said."

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