As more people ditch landline phones for mobiles, America's regulators need to respond

Copper landlines are now an obsolete technology. In these difficult times ever more Americans are heeding this advice and dropping their telephone landlines in favor of mobile phones. Despite some of the flakiest mobile-network coverage in the developed world, one in four households has now gone mobile-only. At current rates the last landline in America will be disconnected sometime in 2025. Rather than trying to keep a 19th-century technology alive, America's telecoms rules must be updated to foster the roll-out of this new, 21st-century infrastructure. Alas, attempts to reform the notoriously bureaucratic Universal Service Fund, the main source of subsidies to make landlines affordable, have gone nowhere. Everyone agrees on the importance of expanding access to broadband—until it is time to hammer out the specific details. Now Barack Obama wants a national strategy. He would do well to concentrate on two things his country needs in the future, not the past: better and more reliable wireless coverage; and more broadband connections, through fibre-optic cables and high-speed wireless links (for both voice and data).