Nearly half of U.S. homes now use cellphones only; more households ditching landlines
Andy Ullom and his 2-year-old daughter, Emma, talk on his cellphone from their home in Washington on Thursday.
A Smartphone and a vintage rotary phone are shown at Crown Antique Mall in Washington Crown Center.
A pay phone, not in working order, outside Uni-Mart on East Maiden Street in Washington
More people are cutting the cord on landlines.
Nearly half of U.S. households use only cellphones, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was released last month.
Researchers for the CDC found that more than 47 percent of American homes use cellphones exclusively, while 42 percent have both.
“You can see from statistics that wireless-only households are on the increase,” said Laura Merritt, public relations spokeswoman for Verizon. “Young people, in particular, are relying more on their wireless devices, whether it’s smartphones or tablets.”
Twelve years ago, just 3 percent of U.S. households used cellphones only, but the CDC predicts that more than half of U.S. homes will be wireless within the next year.
Many people kept landlines for their home security systems, but homeowners no longer need a standard phone line to keep their homes protected, said Chuck Hamby, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless.
Kevin Emerick of Lone Pine dumped his landline 18 years ago.
Back then, the former Marianna Scenery Hill Telephone Co. customer paid a long-distance fee for nearly every telephone call he made.
“To call anyone from here was a toll call. The minute I could port my number out of my local phone company, I did,” said Emerick, who owns a surveillance equipment company and relies on his telephone for his business. “And it’s one less bill that I have to pay. Really, the only reason people would need a landline anymore is if they live in an area where they can get nothing but DSL for Internet.”
The CDC study also found:
• More than 3 percent of homes don’t have a landline or a cellphone. That percentage has been rising slightly since 2012.
• Younger people rely more on wireless-only than older people. About 71 percent of people in their late 20s live in households with only cellphones. Only 19 percent of people 65 and older use only cellphones.
• The Midwest is the most wireless region. Fifty-two percent of adults in the Midwest live in cellphone-only homes. The South and West trailed slightly, and in the Northeast, only 32 percent live in cellphone-only households.
• Poor adults are much more likely than higher-income people to have only cellphones.
The CDC’s study is based on in-person interviews in more than 21,000 homes during the first six months of 2015.
As a result of more Americans going mobile, Pew Research Center plans to increase the percentage of respondents it interviews on cellphone from 65 percent to 75 percent in most of its 2016 telephone surveys.
The center announced this month that it is making the change to ensure its survey samples properly represent the roughly half of U.S. adults who use cellphones exclusively.
Verizon’s Merritt said the demand for wireless isn’t likely to slow down.
Andy Ullom of Washington owns a cellphone and a landline, but he said he seldom uses the landline.
“I haven’t actually dropped our landline yet, but I’m thinking about it,” said Ullom. “I’ve pretty much been dependent on my cellphone for maybe five or six years now. It serves as both my work phone and my home phone, basically. When we bought our house here in Washington, I put the landline in for emergencies. But any phone calls we get on the landline are never for us. It’s either telemarketers or phone calls for a previous owner named Ira, who we don’t even know.”