This week's cellphone outage makes it clear: In the United States, landlines are languishing
When some people's cellphone service went down for a while because of an AT&T network outage, among the alternatives suggested were using landlines
NEW YORK — When her cellphone's service went down this week because of an AT&T network outage, Bernice Hudson didn't panic. She just called the people she wanted to talk to the old-fashioned way — on her landline telephone, the kind she grew up with and refuses to get rid of even though she has a mobile phone.
“Don’t get me wrong, I like cellphones,” the 69-year-old Alexandria, Virginia, resident said Thursday, the day of the outage. “But I’m still old school.”
Having a working landline puts her in select company. In an increasingly digital United States, they're more and more a remnant of a time gone by, an anachronism of a now-unfathomable era when leaving your house meant being unavailable to callers.
Though as Thursday's outage shows, sometimes they can come in handy. They were suggested as part of the alternatives when people's cellphones weren't working. The San Francisco Fire Department, for example, said on social media that people unable to get through to 911 on their mobile devices because of the outage should try using landlines.
In the United States in 2024, that's definitely the exception.
According to the most recent estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics, about 73% of American adults in 2022 lived in households where there were only wireless phones and no landlines, while another 25% were in households with both. Barely over 1% had only landlines.
Contrast that to estimates from early 2003, where fewer than 3% of adults lived in wireless-only households, and at least 95% lived in homes with landlines, which have been around since Alexander
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