Tuesday, May 9, 2017

The cell phone outnumbers the landline.


 LoC Caption:  "The Story of the Telephone. Speeding the spoken word. Scene from the new American Red Cross motion picture, "Speeding the Spoken Word," in which the romance of the telephone is graphically portrayed on the screen".  1920.
The number of mobile-phone users in the U.S. surpassed the number of conventional land-based phone lines in the second half of 2004, the government said Friday.
By the end of the year, there were 181.1 million cellphone subscribers, compared with 177.9 million access lines into U.S. homes and businesses, the Federal Communications Commission said in a biannual report.
Los Angeles Times.

A person has to be careful with statistics as they can lead to incorrect assumptions.  For one thing, this may tend to lead to an erroneous assumption that the number of households with landlines is outnumbered by the number with cell phones only, which would be erroneous.  For example, our house has a landline, but all three of us who live here have cell phones.  In contrast, my son, who is in college, lives in a house in which there are no landlines in use.  There might be for internet service, but no actual landline phone. 

The point is, however, that sheer number of cell phones doesn't equate with households served only by cell phones, although that day is coming.  Indeed, the tyranny of the cell phone is at the point at which a lot of homes have one landline but a lot of cell phones.

Good, bad?

Well, both, I suppose.

FWIW, I'm actually surprised it took this long to reach this point.

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