When major outages hit our mobile carriers and networks go down for hours, we’re left stranded without one of our most critical lines of access to the world. What good is a smartphone if it can’t phone?
Earlier this year, an AT&T outage took down services for more than 12 hours in many of the most populous cities in the US. While the carrier apologized to customers and assured people that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack — blaming it on “the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network” — it still served as a reminder of the perils of relying only on mobile phones.
And it may have made many customers rethink the place of a home device that used to be standard issue but is now nearly obsolete: the landline telephone.
Remember the landline?
Those old-fashioned landlines may still have a place, but only 28% of American households have one.
Landlines are telephones that connect to specialized wiring in our homes. The iconic image is that of a rotary-dial phone — usually rented from the phone company — that either hung on the wall or sat on a counter or table, though push-button and later cordless landlines replaced many of those oldsters in the 1980s. Landline phones connect to one another through a global communication network that was built over more than a century. But as cellphones became broadly available and affordable, many people chose to drop their landlines altogether.
A 2022 survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that only about 29% of US adults lived in a house with a landline phone, down from more than 90% in 2004. The crossover happened around 2015, which was also when smartphone sales entered a boom period that reshaped the tech industry and helped turn iPhone maker Apple into one of the world’s most highly valued companies.
Ann Williams is one of the folks who haven’t given up on their landlines yet. When asked why she keeps hers around, she describes moving to Huntsville, Alabama, after a tornado outbreak on April 27, 2011, when dozens of twisters killed at least 250 people and knocked out power for days. Although she moved there after the tornadoes, hearing about the event brought home to her the importance of always needing a phone connection.
“The weather here is so unpredictable,” she told me in an interview. But landlines have dedicated power and often work even in an outage. “We remember a day when it was absolutely necessary to have (the landline),” Williams said.
What makes landlines more reliable?
Landline phones operate on a separate infrastructure, built from copper phone lines that are inexpensive to build and rather reliable. They also don’t have the drawbacks of cellular networks, like dropped calls, poor and distorted quality or weak reception.
A key reason people keep landlines around is that they tend to work even during power outages, which is a big plus for folks whose work involves emergency services, business or health care.
Analog fax machines are also built around landline phone systems, which means most hospitals and doctor’s offices, as well as policy and law offices, need to keep a landline connection running.
