Tech & Biz

20% of U.S. Homes Have Cell Phones Only, Instead of Landlines

by Jarrett Martineau | May 6, 2009 at 02:19 pm

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Cell phones are nearing complete ubiquity and quickly making traditional telephones outdated.

For the first time ever, 1 in 5 of all U.S. households did away with the wires and cables of traditional phone lines and replaced them with cell phones.

This is also the first time that the 20% of homes with only cell phones (and no land lines) — outpaced the 17% of US homes with only land lines but no cell phones.

How long will it be until landlines are discarded, forgotten, and relegated to the technological past?

In the freshest evidence of the growing appeal of cell phones, 20 percent of households had only cells during the last half of 2008, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released today. That was an increase of nearly 3 percentage points over the first half of the year, the largest six-month increase since the government started gathering such data in 2003.

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Jordan Yerman

at 14:56 on May 6th, 2009

I'm surprised that the number isn't higher, given how relatively inexpensive mobile phone usage is in the US (compared to Canada). When living in New York, I didn't have a landline for years.