More U.S. Households Are Ditching Landline Phones for Wireless

MORE US HOUSEHOLDS ARE DITCHING LANDLINE PHONES FOR WIRELESS
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Li Yuan li.yuan@wsj.com]
Last year, about 8% of U.S. households that subscribe to cellphone service had given up their land-line phones, up from 5% in 2004 and 4% in 2003, according to a survey to be released today by Forrester Research. Households are ditching home wired phones faster because cellphone service is getting cheaper, wireless coverage is improving and fewer people need their land lines for access to the Internet, according to the survey of about 4,500 households with cellphones in the fourth quarter. More than six million households and nearly 6% of the total U.S. population rely exclusively on wireless phones, according to Forrester. The shift away from land-line phones has been particularly painful for phone companies like AT&T and Verizon Communications, which have lost millions of their wired customers. These losses have only partially been mitigated by the large interests that both companies hold in wireless companies. At the same time, the cord-cutting trend doesn't bode well for telephone companies' high-speed Internet businesses. Households that disconnect their wired phone service are four times more likely to buy broadband service from cable operators than from phone companies, according to the Forrester study. Among those who said they were keeping their land-line phones, 34% cited dial-up Internet access as a reason, down from 43% in 2004 and 47% in 2003.
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