More than half age 25-29 only have cell phones | Hacker News Reader

More than half age 25-29 only have cell phones

news.yahoo.com

8 pointsBud30 comments

That's it? I'd expect it to be much higher. I wonder what the percentage is in an urban city like San Francisco... 80%?

Agreed. What are landlines good for?

Even if they were free I wouldn't have one, since when I did have a landline pretty much every call was phone spam.

> What are landlines good for?

Clear, high quality voice communication. I rarely talk on my cell phone. It's essentially for text. I try to call people at their landlines.

Let me guess: iPhone?

When I lived in Boston, my iPhone 4 had amazing coverage and call quality was great. Never experienced a dropped call. Absolutely loved the phone.

Then I moved to Silicon Valley. I've been counting down the days for Verizon to pick up the iPhone, ever since.

There's nothing wrong with the iPhone. AT&T, though...

Family households, especially ones with kids who aren't old enough to have a cellphone but need to use a phone. If you have a five and seven year-old in your house, a $30/month landline might make more sense than two cellphones that would never leave the house anyway.

Really? At $10 per extra phone (on my parent's plan) having a land line is more. Free caller id, voice mail, plus the ability to call between phones for free make having a land line a little silly.

Plus the cost of the cellphone and all the replacements for the cellphone your kid is bound to use.

I'm single and only have a cell, but my friends with kids inform me that landline for a family is the way to go. I see the logic in their argument.

Same - the last time I had a landline was in my college dorm room and it kept getting spam calls until we eventually disconnected it.

They make a great discount on your internet bill. Seriously though Some internet providers either make it cheaper to have phone + internet from them or make it impossible( or at least hard) to get internet without a land line.

I have a phone line for this reason (cheaper) at the moment.

Home emergencies. Large parts of the country do not have E911.

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/wireless911srvc.html

Perhaps the other half is living with their parents.

If you read the article, one detail is that the statistic is that 51% of those in this age group "live in households" which have only cell service. So in other words, this is including the kids still living at home. Viewed through this lens, the shift towards cell-only is clearly much bigger than the simple 51% number implies.

They should have told us what percentage of those in this age group, who live on their own, have only cell service. But we can make a decent guess.

Probably even higher if you exclude people who have a home phone line and don't actually use it. With cables companies pushing their "triple play" packages, it was actually cheaper (counting the free add-ons that Time Warner) included to get the triple play than just cable + internet. Granted, we don't even have a phone hooked into the cable modem/VOIP box, but technically, we do have a home phone line.

I'm not surprised it's not higher, as people of that age bracket are increasingly staying at home and delaying their move out of the parental domicile.

I bet if the numbers were 25-29 year olds who had all left home, it would be significantly higher. I bet very few people in that bracket are actually making the decision to activate a landline in their own places.

I am 29 for a few blessed more months, and I have been landline-free since, well, leaving home for college and my own place. Had I been one of those stay-at-home-until-your-30s types, though, I would fall on the landline side of the statistical breakdown.

I'm 22, for a few more months, and the only reason I got a landline when I moved out is because my cable company offered it to me for ~$4 a month (in total I think it made our bill $10 less a month due to combo savings) and it helped resolve the issue that our buzzer uses the phone network and we couldn't decide who (between me and my wife) should have the buzzer calling their cell.

It also enables me to use a long distance calling card for free, so I can make calls that would cost far in excess of $4 to call my family in the UK.

We do have many friends who are solely cellular homes. It's cheaper for them to pay for low minutes on a smartphone plan than it is to get a land line.

Yeah, I'm surprised it's that low, too. My entire family dropped land lines when cellphones became cheaper. That's including my parents, sisters, etc. None our homes have land lines. We do have Skype, though. It's just cheaper for international calling. (Especially if the other person has Skype, of course.)

This is not really surprising. I have a VOIP home phone, but only because I don't want to chase down my cell when it rings. If i could just have my cell phone work like a cordless phone at home, i.e. all the phones in the house ring when my cell rings, then I would use just my cell.

Google Voice can do this for you.

Google should really extend this service worldwide.

Google voice can dial an existing landline. What i mean is when i get home, I want to be able to place my cell into a cradle and when it rings it rings all the home phones, and calls made from any of the phones in the house would route through the cell network using my phone.

Only 16 percent of Northeasterners live in cell phone-only homes, the lowest of any region. The highest frequency of wireless-only households is in the South, where 29 percent live that way.

Can anyone here figure out the reason behind the statistic? I could imagine cell-phone-only usage being lower than average in rural areas with poor coverage, but the Northeast?

For the commenters asking "what good are landlines for", they still have their uses, eg. in households with children not allowed their own mobiles for various reasons, lower international call rates etc. (I know, you could say "VoIP" but the mainstream penetration of that seems to be on the low side).

Weather? In case of power outage, a land-line will still work (assuming the phone lines aren't down). A cell-phone will work until your battery is gone.

Weather is exactly the reason that my family (just outside of NYC) still keeps a landline around.

Theres also the big blackout from a few years ago that hasn't really been forgotten. If you were to ask, I bet it would come up more often than you might think.

The obvious thing that would correlate with the south would be average household income. Not all of these mobile only households are carrying $70/mo voice+unlimited text+large 3g quota plans, many of them are likely on $5-$15/mo prepaid options because they are cheaper than carrying a landline.

I would expect that the lower-shelf would be way younger than 25. College students living in apartments probably do not have landlines (I didn't when I was in school).

Maybe one contributing factor to it starting at 25 and not say, 21, is that in this economy many college grads are moving back in with their parents who have land lines. College students who have stable jobs and are out on their own two feet (a little bit older on average?) choose not to buy into the landline like their parents continue to do.

I've got one but I almost never use it, just need it for ADSL. In the U.K. I don't see how you avoid one when cable companies give it for free and 3G is too slow and expensive for home.

Question - how do they get their internet? Internet in the UK comes over ADSL (which comes with a landline) or via Cable (and that usually comes with a landline too).

umm haha? of course why do i need a land line?

NOW..... Where the hell did i leave that damn abacus ..

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