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Survey: More are ditching landlines

Twenty percent of households had only cell phones in last half of 2008.

Trend to chuck land-line phone grows

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By Margo Rutledge Kissell, Staff Writer 11:43 PM Monday, May 25, 2009

Danielle Troutman, a communications consultant for Cincinnati Bell, said she’s seeing more customers ages 18-30 opting for cell phones only.

The Kettering resident isn’t surprised. She, too, only uses a mobile phone because she said she’s rarely home.

“For most people nowadays, everything is go, go, go,” said Troutman, 28.

Twenty percent of households had only cell phones during the last half of 2008, up 3 percentage points over the first half of that year. Meanwhile, 17 percent had only landlines.

The number of people using only cell phones has changed dramatically since 2003, when just 3 percent of households were wireless only and 43 percent had landlines only, according to data from the National Health Interview Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

People who live in homes that have only wireless service tend to be disproportionately low-income, young, renters and Hispanics, the survey found.

Other findings:

• About a third of people ages 18-24 live in households with only cells, as well as four in 10 people ages 25-29.

• 15 percent of households have landlines and wireless phones but take few or no calls on their landlines, often because they are wired into computers. Combined with wireless only, that means 35 percent of homes — more than one in three — are basically reachable only on cells.

Steve Parish, 36, of Springfield, bucks the landline-to-cellphone-only trend. He used to have a cell phone but no landline at home.

Parish said he decided to add a traditional phone line after his daughter, Audrey, was born four years ago. For him, it was a matter of safety.

If there’s ever an emergency at home, Parish said he wanted his daughter to have access to a traditional telephone to dial 911.

Parish was concerned she might not know how to operate a cell phone or that she’d “need to know her address,” too, if she tried to report an emergency.

Earlier this spring, Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer warned about a problem with some cell phones not connecting properly with 911 dispatchers.

That happened April 7 when a Cricket Wireless cell phone user in Miamisburg failed to reach 911 dispatchers after several attempts while his garage was ablaze.

His phone did not put the call through correctly. Instead, he reached administrative offices in Miamisburg, which answered only with a recording. Officials found the same problem was occurring in Englewood and other communities because Cricket had not properly routed the calls through its towers because of a programming error.

Cricket Wireless officials later said the problem had been corrected.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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