Why the CDC Tracks Wireless-Only Households and Their Risky Behavior
npr.org
npr.org
In the case of a cellphone-only household, it's really easy to think of a time when all of the cellphone holders are not present, so that there's no real contact into or out of the house, potentially with people present. In the case of a 911 situation like someone choking or having a heart attack (or a fire) that could come down to going up and down the street knocking on a neighbor's door, or jumping in a sedan to race to the hospital.
I also wonder how accurate geo-location would be for 911 calls, where it's very easy (I would hope) for 911 operators to know the exact street address of someone making an emergency call, even if they ask for the address as well.
911 service from a landline is independent of having a paid account with the carrier. The same applies to cell companies - which is why you might see a "emergency calls only" flag in areas of poor service.
http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/Consumer+Information/Change...
Can't have those poors making emergency medical calls until they pay what they owe.
The disgusting thing is, after this passed, the rates jumped about 50%. I was willing to pay under $20/month for land line service, but paying almost $30/month (for metered access, even for local calls!) was just too much.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/12/business/la-fi-lazar...
"Since 2011, the California Public Utilities Commission has allowed phone companies to raise -- or lower -- basic phone rates whenever they choose, rather than seek approval from regulators. Since then, costs have steadily gone up."
This, and the fact that the state now controls cable TV franchises, have left me pretty disillusioned with California government.
So the reasons that some houses may no longer have even 911 service is because their physical wiring has been disconnected. This requires sending out a technician, so it's only done if there's a reason, usually that another house's line has failed and they want to use the known good one for that house. It's not the providers being evil - it's them not wanting to have to maintain a huge amount of physical infrastructure for subscribers that don't exist and, per the trend, will never exist again.
I'm sure technology has improved since then, but the apt complex I live in now in NYC has 25,000 residents over 80 acres. My guess is the closest geolocation they'd get is to a cluster of a couple buildings, which could easily be close to 500 different residences.
The CDC isn't saying that only having a cell phone is itself risky. They're saying it correlates with risky behavior.
It is much less of a problem then it used to be, but cell phones haven't reached 100% parity with landlines.
Consider:
1. Cell phones require reception. At my house, cell reception is universally awful for all providers. I may not be able to even make a call to 911 on a cell phone and, if I do, I am not sure I can trust the reliability of e911. Work arounds include in-home Wi-Fi and femtocells, but...
2. Cell phones require power. In a prolonged power outage (or in the case of my daughter, even a five minute one), I can't gaurantee there will even be a working cell phone on the premises. Wi-Fi won't work, and the femtocell won't work, either.
3. Cell phones get misplaced. In an emergency will I even remember where in the house I set it down?
That's not to say that cell phones don't also offer many advantages in an emergency. They do. Cell phones are usually available and usually close to a person. They can be turned on and hidden but still allow 911 operators to hear what is going on. There is usually about one cell phone per person, etc., etc.
But, at my house at least, I can't completely forgo a landline (although I have at other locations in the past).
In my experience in a ice storm with long lasting effects, the days when all landlines were adequately powered from a central office are long gone. Your local box's smallish battery will run out no longer than a day or two (others in this discussion say 12 hours), at which time you're better off having a cell phone, which you can arrange to power in a variety of ways. And I'm appalled that after my mother switched to U-verse DSL, her home telecom is now powered through a UPS supplied by AT&T.
If you take no preparations, though, you're better off with a landline. If you're paranoid like me and my family, you have both, I pay ~$12/month for a Consumer Cellular (AT&T MVNO that doesn't suck) candybar that stays off the air most of the time, and is priceless even at 25 cents/minute in emergencies.
Another problem is the way cellphones are over-provisioned; last time I was in a (minor, no injuries, but noticeable) earthquake, I couldn't make calls for some time afterwards.
This was back in the day, I was on a nokia communicator, which I mention because it had software such that I could send a text message, and it would keep retrying until it got through. I mention this because I was surprised to find that the behavior of the iphone is different. You have to manually retry.
This seems the biggest problem. While there's good reception at home, on vacation we went some places where there was no signal. That's worse than the days before cellphones were ubiquitous because payphones aren't around much anymore.
> 2. Cell phones require power. In a prolonged power outage
A prolonged power outage is one case where solar chargers and portable battery chargers come in really handy. They also work if you are somewhere away from outlets for awhile, while land lines don't.
> 3. Cell phones get misplaced
True, but the difference between one landline per house (single point of failure) vs many cellphones (one per person) makes up for that somewhat.
Land line != POTS line. Many landlines (including my own) are part of a Cable TV/Internet/Phone package and provided via your cable modem, which requires mains power from the house.
This is definitely a valid concern if it applies to you. My mother, for example, would never give up her landline because the reception at her house is definitely inferior to her landline.
I, on the other hand, have consistently excellent reception. I think in general people who have good reception are the ones going land-line only.
> 2. Cell phones require power.
These days, so do many landlines (especially handheld/wireless ones). I could keep my phone charged for 48 hours of normal usage (backup batteries) and far longer if I went into power saving mode.
> 3. Cell phones get misplaced.
A cell phone is always on my person, whereas I would have to hunt down where the landline is.
I guess there are tradeoffs to both, so I'm not comfortable saying you must have only one or the other.
Its one of the defining social/cultural separations of our generation. Even inside families, my wife is a member of your camp and her phone is never out of her physical possession, ever, it even charges next to her in bed, whereas I'm in the other camp and I move my phone from charger to charger and only physically carry it when I'm going out for awhile or if I'm expecting a call.
It has the virtue that in any group of people, there will always be at least one with the ankle bracelet ready for use in one second, even if the battery is nearly dead, and at least one with a fully charged phone a couple minutes away on its charger. So as a group you can get both instant response AND a full day of battery life.
Contrast that with my childhood neigbor pranking 911 from my home phone in the early 80s. The police knew where the call came from and showed up promptly.
However in a post-social media, post-internet, post-wireless world, every anecdotal failure will be documented as highly unusual and noteworthy. All of them. Therefore there will be a societal belief that 911 never works and only fails. Kind of like all jetliner flights end in crashes, because those are the only flights anyone ever hears about.
There is also a survivorship bias in that the only reports will be anecdotal awful ones. No one other than myself will go to the effort to post that in the last five years of GPS enabled smart phones I have only called 911 precisely one time for a minor property damage vehicle accident and the transfer time couldn't have been over five seconds (although in a stressful situation everything seems to slow down...)
I suspect that when a disaster happens and 100 people try to simultaneously call it in to a 10 person call center, the fact that the 95th person to report a crashed airplane took 5 minutes is utterly irrelevant to actual incident response latency. The trucks and sirens have already been rolling for almost 5 minutes, however frustrated the caller may be.
I think it goes without saying that cell phones were a very real regression for 911.
Haven't had a landline in years. I don't smoke, I don't binge drink. Hoping these stats don't end up affecting my insurance premiums.
But even then, in multi-story buildings GPS may be hard to acquire in the first place.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc... for general information.
"Compared with adults living in landline households, wireless-only adults were more likely to have their health status described as excellent or very good, more likely to have met the 2008 federal physical activity guidelines for aerobic activity (based on leisure-time activity), and less likely to have ever been diagnosed with diabetes." http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20151...
Instead, you should add the local emergency dispatch numbers to your phone as contacts. You can call the police station and ask for it - also ask them when it would be okay for you to call emergency dispatch to verify it routes correctly.
A lot of bay area numbers are listed here: http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_...
Please stop what you are doing right now and program in the dispatch numbers for where you live and work.
Except that's not what they're saying. This is literally what they're saying: "You know, we can't say for certain; perhaps at that time dropping the landline was in effect risky behavior."
That doesn't really compute to me. My 80 year old grandparents have been cell phone only for about 5 years, because it's just as cheap as a landline and they can call from anywhere. Same with my 60 year old parents. It makes them feel safer to be able to call from the car in case their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. These are very conservative people. They own their house. They've had the same jobs for a decade+. They don't smoke. They drink moderately. The riskiest thing they do in any given day is drive to work. Granted, this is n=1, but I can name about half a dozen other households who are about the same in a very conservative rural area who have also dropped their land lines.
No, that's their explanation for why there might be a correlation. It's quite clearly not something they're actually certain about.
The only fact the CDC believes is that cell phone exclusivity correlates with risky behaviors.
This is an interview with NPR, not an academic paper. You may as well question whether the correlation exists at all as hone in on this one point.
A friend has dropped his landline ages ago, but he does enjoy drinking a good whisky, and he even smokes occasionally.
It turns out 911 is handled very differently (at least in California). If I were to call 911 from my landline I'm connected to our local dispatch & my address is automatically sent. If I were to call from our cell phones, only the cell tower is sent (and maybe that), and the call is routed through a statewide system.
I hope to never have to actually call, but figured it's worth the small fee if seconds matter.
That said, it still seems backwards. My cell phone has GPS coordinates. I would hope that someone in the not-too-distant-future we can make calling 911 as good (if not better) on a cell phone.
Free internet calls have not only existed for years but you can even get free cell service these days with services like ringplus.
So landlines are the new AOL users (and probably a huge intersection at that).
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/15/8965409/us-internet-access...
Of course it could mean that people living in broadband poor regions with poor cell service are the new 'unreachables'. They don't have reliable land lines, and their cell service is spotty. This in itself is a worrying theory as people with times of service unavailability are much more likely to remain in poverty, many types of jobs poorer people work have on demand scheduling where their hours are changed commonly. Being unreachable they may quickly find themselves fired.
That said, if you live in one of the increasing number of states trying to circumvent these federal requirements, you may indeed have to keep paying just to have emergency access, or you may end up being forced out of landline access altogether:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-rul...
You can still use your cell phone if the power goes out and it's often more reliable (fallen trees often take out phone service with the power, but not cell phone towers).
They have battery backups, but once those fail, it's a question of whether the phone company can hook up a generator in time. (Some towers in large metros have permanent generators, but not all.)
You probably connect to a neighborhood SLC hut (a filing cabinet sized green box?) that converts a neighborhood to optical or perhaps a T-1 or perhaps a HDSL T-1 and feeds that single line back to partner equipment in the CO. There is usually a short term battery on the SLC hut (sometimes they catch fire).
The bigger problem is the most likely reason to lose power is aerial lightning strike or tree downing the cables. Its very unusual to lose power for any other reason away from the coasts, never had rolling blackouts or whatever. So the only time I'd need to make a call (to the electric company?) is when the landline phone would be knocked out anyway either by lightning fried phone or cables laying on the ground under a tree. That was one of the nice parts of getting my first cell phone a bit over 20 years ago was I could call in power failures or whatever. Not that it happens enough to matter, LOL.
With modern smart meters the electric company gets pretty fast stats on downed lines anyway, so there's not much point in calling.
My uncle-in-law in a nursing home has a landline. Not a PBX extension off the nursing home but for whatever weird legal / financial reasons he has his own account with the phone company much like an apartment building has separate accounts rather than a business PBX. I suspect folks like him are part of the 8% who have a landline and no cell phone, and that number will never drop to zero.
Actually not entirely true. Following Hurricane Sandy, a majority of Manhattan from about 42nd street south to the Battery was without power for several days. A lot of the rooftop cells that fill in gaps in service lost power and so coverage area and capacity were greatly reduced.
Furthermore, a fairly significant (but definitely not majority) of landlines are over VoIP with FIOS. Battery backups for the Demarcs only lasted about 12hrs and even if yours lasted longer, you still might have difficulties because some COs were flooded and/or had generator failures.
(And they pretty much boil down to: "why put hundreds/thousands of expensive cell towers in the sparsely populated cornfields and plains that cover the country")\
1) The USA is geographically massive. Infrastructure between isolated "neighbouring" cities can be hundreds of kilometers. Cell towers, needless to say, are more expensive when attempting to cover a larger geographical area.
2) The population density varies dramatically
3) There are many rural pockets of thinly-distributed populaces, which can make the ROI lower in aforementioned large coverage areas
4) There are many mountainous, isolated communities, whose topography negatively affects coverage
5) Unlike Finland, where coastal/southern communities contain the vast majority of the populace, and nobody living up north,[1] the US Midwest contains a large populace, thinly spread over an enormous area... [2]
Copper landlines are reliable and simple to fix.
Cellphone towers are expensive, have a limited range, are highly affected by topography, and thus only make sense in areas above a certain threshold of population densities. And even still, living in a neighbouring community of a metropolitan area, you may be out of range of the metro's cell towers, and the ROI for your smaller community may not justify the expense!
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland#/media...
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_states_showing_pop...
Size comparison: http://overlapmaps.com/index.php, or http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/US/FI
How about the correlation between longer 911 response times with lack of landlines? Now that would be interesting.
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/05/3-reasons-vo...
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20151...
What is this article on about?