Death of the landline - Brits using home phone half as much as in 2012, says Ofcom
Britons spend almost half as much time using their landlines as they did six years ago while mobile phone data demand has grown tenfold, new Ofcom data shows.
The demand for landline calls has dropped from 103 billion minutes in 2012 to 54 billion in 2017, while mobile call minutes increased from 132.1 billion to 148.6 billion.
Meanwhile, the average person's demand for instant messaging and internet phone calls has increased from 0.2 gigabytes to 1.9 gigabytes during the same period.
In the coming years, Ofcom expects broadband calls to overtake traditional telephone calls for the first time.
The move to ditch landlines in favour of mobile phones could end the need for remembering phone numbers or even having to dial them, Ofcom has claimed.
Liz Greenberg, head of numbering at Ofcom, said: "Some of us can remember a time when we stored phone numbers in our head, rather than our mobile. But the way we use and feel about telephone numbers is changing.
"In the future, as more calls are made over broadband, dialling codes won’t need to be fixed to a particular part of the country. So the question is – could area codes become a thing of the past?"
This move to mobile could be spurred on by Ofcom's objective to improve coverage in rural areas. In December 2018, it introduced new rules to encourage operators to improve coverage for 140,000 homes and offices in the UK within the next four years.
Current figures show that 83pc of urban homes and offices have complete 4G coverage, while the figure for rural premises is less than half that (41pc).
The demand for mobile internet services has dramatically grown, Ofcom found, with 67pc of people using their mobile phones for general browsing online and 76pc using it for web and data access, up from 28pc and 35pc respectively in 2011.
The number of landlines fell by 1pc to 33.1 million last year, as a result of businesses switching to mobile and VoIP-based voice services, the telecoms regulator said.
This fall in business lines was partly offset by a 1pc increase in the number of residential landlines. This was attributed to the growing uptake of fixed broadband, as most households in the UK need a landline to be able to access fixed broadband services.
Ofcom said it is considering the use of blockchain technology to manage UK landline numbers more effectively in future, claiming that it could make it quicker and easier for landline customers to switch providers while keeping their number, and potentially reduce nuisance calls.
