Taking a moment to hark the passing of landlines
For the first time in my life, our household is without a land line. Research shows we are a little behind the times. And maybe it’s a generational thing.
I remember as a kid when my parents got a second land line for the kids in the family. We were teenagers and the phone was on a small table in the hall. There were many nights of long, lazy, talk-about-nothing conversations with friends and boyfriends. My sister and I would drag the phone in our room with the cord under the door and talk for hours – hoping our mom wouldn’t catch us in the middle of the night.
Those sentimental memories might be one reason for my attachment to a landline. We had one because, well, we had always had one.
Practically speaking though, there was nothing practical about hanging on to a landline in 2022. It was a $30 a month charge by Comcast/Xfinity in addition to our wi-fi, cable and other charges. We rarely checked the messages and when we did it was usually no one we needed to talk with. And then, we conservatively calculated that in the last 10 years we had spent $4,000 for a service we no longer needed
A survey was done in 2018 by the CDC to determine what was happening with telephone use. At that time, 55% of households used only cell phones. In just over a dozen years, that number had increased from 10% to over half of households.
More than a third (36%) of households had both a mobile phone and a landline. We were one of those households. Just 5% of households had only a landline.
Those who used cell phones exclusively were found to be generally younger, healthier, and didn’t own their own homes.
My group, the 36%, were generally older and owned their homes. But, I wondered, why did we hang on to a landline for so many years when we almost exclusively used a cell phone to communicate? I inquired with other people who had done the same.
The bottom line was not sentimentality. Security drove the decision. What if the cell phone service failed? In my own urban area, the heart of Albuquerque, calls often get dropped, and the service can be poor. In rural New Mexico, the answer is unequivocally security, as cell service is often unreliable.
Landlines have been around for more than 146 years – from the time inventor Alexander Graham Bell secured the patent in 1876 – and made his first call. Before that, communicating across distance was virtually impossible. The landline and the telegraph changed that forever.
Telephones, like many inventions, were originally thought of as a novelty and only available to royalty. By the start of World War I there were 10 people to every landline and by 1945 there were 5 people to every landline.
Forty years later in 1998, there was one phone for every man, woman, and child in the country.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that telephones were not only revolutionary but also revolutionized our lives.
Today, everyone carries a phone. Little kids to reach their parents. Teens to reach their peeps and to report in when not home on time. Young adults have them to track their kids and their parents.
When I asked some of these same people why they had cell phones with them all the time – beyond just communicating – the most frequent responses were “for safety,” “making sure my kids are safe,” and “recording terrible things happening.”
Turns out that from landlines to small computers in our pockets or purses, the safety and security of communicating and being in touch still drives our love affair with the telephone.
This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: Taking a moment to hark the passing of landlines
