A survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds wired residential telephones have disappeared from nearly half of American homes. By next year, a majority of homes will likely be landline free, wireless service replacing wired.

How does the CDC know this? It conducts a regular National Health Information Survey, which seeks a telephone number for use if researchers need to follow-up with survey participants. Since 2003, the survey has also asked about wired vs. wireless telephone usage.

For the first half of 2014, the survey found 44 percent of homes surveyed had only wireless service, up three percentage points from the second half of 2013. Already, more than half of adults and children aged 44 and younger live in wireless-only households. Here is a link to the CDC’s detailed release.

Ten years ago, 90 percent of households has a traditional POTS (plain old telephone service) lines. If the trend holds, by this time next year a majority will be wireless.

The downside to wireless-only, and how to cope

As someone who remembers receiving more than one nasty shock while I was installing an “illegal” extension when a call came in, I have considerable fondness for wired telephones. My main concern about the wireless-only trend is the difficulty it may create for emergency responders. Despite advances, cellular devices still don’t provide as detailed location information as 911 centers’ computerized dispatch consoles would prefer.

On the wireless side, while we have technology to, for example, warn every cell phone in a geographic area about an emergency, we still lack the ability to do this with great specificity. You cannot, for example, use a National Weather Service warning polygon to notify all the wireless phones inside that box.

To do this, telephones would have to be passing location information to the network at all times so it could be compared to a warning’s coverage area. I am not sure it would be possible to poll this information on an as-needed basis.

I ditched landline — something I never really expected to do — when I replaced satellite TV with AT&T’s Uverse service, which offers too-expensive wireline-equivalent telephone service. Since I was already paying for the sorta fast Internet that AT&T offers, I simply plugged in a MagicJack VoIP device and now use that for dial tone.

My house is in a fringe area, so cellular-only is not a good option for me. MagicJack has the benefit of being portable, allowing me to carry an older model in my travel case, giving me a telephone anyplace Internet service is available.  I have been pleased with MagicJack and recommend it to friends, especially those needing extra telephone numbers or a number in a distant area code.

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