CDC Reports Wireless-Only Phone Households Now the Majority in US (May 5, 2017)

The CDC runs a twice-yearly study to determine how many households use landlines and how many use mobile phones only. That might seem like a strange thing for a government department responsible for studying disease to look into, but it first began doing so to determine whether its surveys needed to start including mobile respondents, as landline-based surveys were going to become less representative of the overall population over time. Well, those landline households are now less than half the overall population, while mobile-only households are now the majority, which has significant implications for polling and especially political polling, where automated dialing often hits only landline households. But the new numbers (and the trend over the last many years) are also a great illustration of how even technology that was once ubiquitous and considered essential can be displaced by something else, even something that on the face of it seems inferior in several respects (in this case, call quality, expense, the need to charge a battery, and so on, though all these things have improved over time). That’s worth remembering when looking at today’s dominant technologies and companies – there’s no reason to believe they’ll stick around forever either.

via Fortune


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