This week’s cellphone outage makes it clear: In the United States, landlines are languishing

NEW YORK — When her cell phone service went out this week due to 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, the kind she grew up with and refuses to put away even though she has a cell phone.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love cell phones,” the 69-year-old Alexandria, Virginia, resident said Thursday, the day of the outage. “But I’m still old-fashioned.”

With a working landline, she is in a select group. In an increasingly digital United States, they are increasingly a relic of a bygone era, an anachronism from a now unfathomable era when leaving your home meant being unavailable to callers.

But as Thursday’s outage shows, they can sometimes come in handy. They were presented as part of the alternatives when people’s mobile phones were not working. For example, the San Francisco Fire Department said on social media that people who are unable to reach 911 due to the outage should try using a landline.

In the United States in 2024, this will certainly be an exception.

According to the most recent estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2022 about 73 percent of American adults lived in households with only cordless phones and no landlines, while another 25 percent lived in households with both. Barely over 1 percent only had a landline.

Compare that to estimates from early 2003, where less than 3 percent of adults lived in wireless-only households, and at least 95 percent lived in homes with landlines, which had been around since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876.

Twenty years ago, landline phone service was the “bread and butter” for phone companies, said Michael Hodel, an equity analyst at Morningstar Research Services LLC who follows the telecom industry. Now, he said, “it has become an afterthought,” replaced by services like broadband Internet access and the many ways to connect with others by voice.

In today’s United States, landlines have practically reached urban legend status in a country where connecting via cell phones to the people you want – at the precise times you want, on the precise platforms you prefer – feels fundamental enough to be a constitutional right.

Across most age groups, the vast majority were wireless-only, with the exception of those 65 and older, the only group where fewer than half are estimated to use cellphones alone.

They’re people like Rebecca Whittier, 74, of Penacook, New Hampshire. She has both types of lines, but prefers to use a landline. She was only given a basic mobile phone for emergencies when she was away from home.

“You’d probably call me old-fashioned,” she said. “I’m not good with computers or electronics. So a landline is good.”

What caused the change? It was that shift from phones intended primarily for voice communications to small, data-saturated computers that we carried in our pockets, Hodel says.

Of particular note: the introduction of Apple’s first iPhone in 2007. The rise of the smartphone has fundamentally changed people’s relationship with the devices in their pockets. “I think that was the big turning point where smartphone adoption really took off,” Hodel says.

The introduction of a new technology into society has a backlash effect on the technology it displaces, says Brian Ott, professor of communications and media at Missouri State University.

“Basically, the new technology trains us to change our use of the old technology,” Ott said. “So even though the old technology has not disappeared, the logic of mobile telephony exists today throughout our society, even for people who still have landlines.”

But the sometimes heady rush to adopt new technologies can have its own problems, he said: “Anytime a new technology is introduced, there’s kind of a rapid adoption period before we understand the consequences.”

According to him, the outage is a good example of this. Although the issue was quickly resolved, it raises questions about what would happen if a large-scale event were to disrupt mobile phones on a larger scale in a world where landline phones are no longer as ubiquitous.

However, Hodel was skeptical about the idea that people would be so restless that they would bring landlines and extra phone bills back into their lives.

“Unless you’re really faced with something terrible, the chances of you worrying about doing anything about it seem pretty slim,” he said. “The service we get where we are connected the vast majority of the time, if not all the time, has been enough to keep people happy overall.”

The outage made Mary Minshew of Bethesda, Maryland, who is in her 40s, feel better about the landline that she and her husband have so far been unable to eliminate. They don’t use it; they and their children all have cell phones. And when it actually rings, she thinks it’s a scam or a sales call and doesn’t answer.

But, she said, part of sticking with it was “out of this concern that you would always have to have a landline if something like that ever happened. I mean, it’s rare. But something like that did happen.”