The traditional landline phone is dying in Europe, according to a new study reported by the BBC. On average, 18% of European households now have no landline phone but do have a mobile phone. This figure rises as high as 48% in Lithuania and 42% in Finland. It also reveals that there are 95 mobile phones for every 100 people in Europe.
Read on in the full article.
"installed a second landline in order to use dial-up internet access without blocking their main phone number"
Why? Why not upgrade to ISDN instead? Strange thought IMHO...
I think it is good to have both, mobile phone and landline, and you can add your mobile phone to your landline when using VoIP.
Also high speed internet requires a landline access. You can have useable speeds via HSDPA, but in most countries there are no unlimited data plans and if they exist they are more expensive than DSL.
So I am curious how this develops in the fututre.
My landline is only used for incomming calls and so that I can connect to ADSL. If they did cheaper leased lines around ADSL speed but SDSL (and not much more expensive than ADSL) then I'd probably swap to one of those and drop the landline completely.
@Unregistered; What with the price of ISDN a lot of people saw it cheaper to just get a second line purely for dial-up. I know people who did it. But then I also know people who got second lines for their kids to make voice calls too.
It's only a matter of time until home landlines pretty much disappear - after all, when you think about it, if I want to speak to my mother it seems odd to call her house rather than her!
The thing is, when is OFCOM going to acknowledge that the landline is disappearing and do something to fight the huge costs of calling 0870 and 0845 numbers from mobiles? These numbers are being used by almost every large organization now, but unless you can get to a landline, calling one costs a packet.
This is very true in india too, where the number of cell phone connections are far more than landlines. One reason for that could also be because of the fact that cell phones are for individual use, whereas landlines are shared in a house.
In india now, most of the people now install a 'line' only for a DSL connection. Maybe that will change too once Wi-max is introduced.
we thend to use our landline for calls to other lanlines, mobiles we tend to call on other mobile because it tends to be cheeper for us.
Also high speed internet requires a landline access.
This survey is about landline phones, not landline access. It's about how many people have a phone plugged into an active landline phone connection, not just people who have a copper wire going into their house.
Broadband requires a physical wire to be present, which is usually the same wire that used to be used for landline phone calls, but it does not require the user to have a landline phone account or a landline phone.
Many people nowadays plug their modems into what used to be the landline phone wire, but that wire does not provide a phone service any more, it's used entirely for DSL services.
Why? Why not upgrade to ISDN instead? Strange thought IMHO...
During the 1990s ISDN cost more than the price of adding a second line. Also, most people had never even heard of ISDN because it was marketed almost entirely at businesses.
ADSL was cheaper, faster and marketed more at consumers, so it was much more effective at removing the demand for a second line.
There's also fax machines to consider too, some people had a second line dedicated to faxes (though this was a bit silly as you could just buy a combined phone/fax and press the fax button if you heard bleeping).
Consumers on a cable network such as the VM ASDH for their TV feeds don't need a landline to use Broadband. There is no DSL involved and the existing infrastruture is scaling to 50Mb/s.
Consumers on a cable network such as the VM ASDH for their TV feeds don't need a landline to use Broadband
Well, it depends what you mean by landline. Everyone who uses broadband has to have some kind of wire plugged into their house, whether it's a phone cable or a television cable.
Even so-called "wireless" internet access (and indeed wireless phone access) is just a short range hop to a nearby base station, which has a big fat wire plugged into it to do the real long-range transmission work.
So perhaps landlines aren't disappearing at all, they're simply losing their connection with a particular phone or phone number. Mobile phones can jump from one base station to another without the user having to do anything special, and the latest phones can use a mixture of different wireless standards depending on what's available in their current location (for example wifi at home and 2G or 3G on the move).
People were/are still using dial up in 2007? It may be different in other countries, but here in the USA the landline is definately dying, quickly. With Unlimited Talk Plans on cell phones, Unlimited Bundle Packages for Phone, Internet, and Cable TV for 80.00 a month no extra charges no matter where in the world you call, a regular phone is obsolete. DSL remains expensive even bundled. I love cable though.
None of our family here in Finalnd have a landline. We all use our mobiles. The only communications connection to our homes is broadband, which is used for the internet.