
Why the CDC Tracks Wireless-Only Households and Their Risky Behavior - fraqed
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/12/03/458225197/the-daredevils-without-landlines-and-why-health-experts-are-tracking-them
======
xigency
It's interesting that the article doesn't address this, but the reason I think
that relying only on cellphones without a landline is risky has to do with
emergency situations, and for some reason I thought the CDC would tie into
that, but maybe I've just been watching too much of the walking dead.

In the case of a cellphone-only household, it's really easy to think of a time
when all of the cellphone holders are not present, so that there's no real
contact into or out of the house, potentially with people present. In the case
of a 911 situation like someone choking or having a heart attack (or a fire)
that could come down to going up and down the street knocking on a neighbor's
door, or jumping in a sedan to race to the hospital.

I also wonder how accurate geo-location would be for 911 calls, where it's
very easy (I would hope) for 911 operators to know the exact street address of
someone making an emergency call, even if they ask for the address as well.

~~~
morgante
That used to be a problem, but by now cell phones are just as useful in
emergency scenarios.

The CDC isn't saying that only having a cell phone is itself risky. They're
saying it correlates with risky behavior.

~~~
cgriswald
> That used to be a problem, but by now cell phones are just as useful in
> emergency scenarios.

It is much less of a problem then it used to be, but cell phones haven't
reached 100% parity with landlines.

Consider:

1\. Cell phones require reception. At my house, cell reception is universally
awful for all providers. I may not be able to even make a call to 911 on a
cell phone and, if I do, I am not sure I can trust the reliability of e911.
Work arounds include in-home Wi-Fi and femtocells, but...

2\. Cell phones require power. In a prolonged power outage (or in the case of
my daughter, even a five minute one), I can't gaurantee there will even be a
working cell phone on the premises. Wi-Fi won't work, and the femtocell won't
work, either.

3\. Cell phones get misplaced. In an emergency will I even remember where in
the house I set it down?

That's not to say that cell phones don't also offer many advantages in an
emergency. They do. Cell phones are usually available and usually close to a
person. They can be turned on and hidden but still allow 911 operators to hear
what is going on. There is usually about one cell phone per person, etc., etc.

But, at my house at least, I can't completely forgo a landline (although I
have at other locations in the past).

~~~
hga
_Cell phones require power. In a prolonged power outage (or in the case of my
daughter, even a five minute one), I can 't gaurantee there will even be a
working cell phone on the premises. Wi-Fi won't work, and the femtocell won't
work, either._

In my experience in a ice storm with long lasting effects, the days when all
landlines were adequately powered from a central office are long gone. Your
local box's smallish battery will run out no longer than a day or two (others
in this discussion say 12 hours), at which time you're better off having a
cell phone, which you can arrange to power in a variety of ways. And I'm
appalled that after my mother switched to U-verse DSL, her home telecom is now
powered through a UPS supplied by AT&T.

If you take no preparations, though, you're better off with a landline. If
you're paranoid like me and my family, you have both, I pay ~$12/month for a
Consumer Cellular (AT&T MVNO that doesn't suck) candybar that stays off the
air most of the time, and is priceless even at 25 cents/minute in emergencies.

~~~
tacon
You can further minimize your cell phone backup costs with PTel.com, a
T-Mobile MVNO, which costs $5/month (minimum spend) and $.05/minute. I had
them for my (lightly used) cell service until recently, when I switched to
Google's Project Fi, which opportunistically connects to either T-Mobile or
Sprint, as needed. From a reliability standpoint, Project Fi might offer a bit
more piece of mind with dual providers available, though it requires late
model Nexus phones at the moment.

------
marcusgarvey
The rise of cellphone-only households why I'm skeptical of presidential
polling. Don't most of these polls rely on those with landlines?

~~~
logn
I am also skeptical because the people answering polls are people who answer
robocalls/spam/surveys.

------
kstenerud
I'm actually surprised at how many people still have landlines. I switched
over to wireless in 1998 and never looked back.

~~~
jessaustin
It used to be the case that a landline was required to get DSL. I don't know
if it still is, but that would be a reasonable explanation.

~~~
Bill_Dimm
DSL is available without telephone service, at least with Verizon in
Pennsylvania. It is called "dry loop DSL." 3 Mbps / 768 kbps is costing me
more than the price they are advertising for 50 Mbps / 50 Mbps FiOS (which I
can't get) without contract. So it exists but it sucks, and I'm not sure you
actually save much (or anything) by getting DSL without telephone service.

------
mcv
I don't smoke and rarely drink, but we're also considering dropping our
landline. Mainly because we rarely use it, few people ever call us on it, the
phone itself is crap, and we don't care enough to replace it with a properly
working phone.

A friend has dropped his landline ages ago, but he does enjoy drinking a good
whisky, and he even smokes occasionally.

------
wdr1
My wife & I were wireless-only until we had our first child.

It turns out 911 is handled very differently (at least in California). If I
were to call 911 from my landline I'm connected to our local dispatch & my
address is automatically sent. If I were to call from our cell phones, only
the cell tower is sent (and _maybe_ that), and the call is routed through a
statewide system.

I hope to never have to actually call, but figured it's worth the small fee if
seconds matter.

That said, it still seems backwards. My cell phone has GPS coordinates. I
would hope that someone in the not-too-distant-future we can make calling 911
as good (if not better) on a cell phone.

~~~
viraptor
GPS will only be helpful on flat terrain. If you live on the 25th floor, your
location may be ~a block away from where you really are. Subscription address
will be again more useful.

------
nickpsecurity
Here I thought I was going to find CDC secretly studying the effects of cell
phone exposure on people's health and behavior. Would've been fun and
controversial. Gotta be something boring I guess.

------
zw123456
For those interested in digging into the facts and data, this FCC document is
actually pretty good and no white wash in my view:
[https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Do...](https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet65/oet65b.pdfhttps://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet65/oet65b.pdf)
I hope that link works but you can google the title "Evaluating Compliance
with FCC Guidelines for Human Exposure to Radiofrequency Electromagnetic
Fields" and it comes right up. There are some interesting tables and graphs
for the TL;DR Figure 1 on page 30, shows the relationship between distance and
ERP to the power density. Then Table 1, Page 72. Most cell phones operate in
the .6 - 2.5 Ghz range and the power is ~ 100mw range. Cell towers operate at
about 40 - 60 W ERP, the distance depends on where you are.

------
mirimir
Contrary to my paranoid reading of the title, I get from the article that the
CDC does not individually _track_ wireless-only households. They are
apparently just looking at aggregate statistics. However, I do wonder whether
they retain any individualized data.

~~~
ghostly_s
It's not just you. It's a pretty click-baity, low-information title.

------
ghostly_s
I have a hard time seeing how they can control for age in their analysis of
this trait, as I'm not aware of a single person under 30 who has a landline,
or any intention of ever acquiring one.

------
ck2
The mind blowing fact is people still pay for long distance calls on landlines
and it's not cheap.

Free internet calls have not only existed for years but you can even get free
cell service these days with services like ringplus.

So landlines are the new AOL users (and probably a huge intersection at that).

~~~
jhauris
Land line user here. Don't get cell service at my house, the WISP we use for
internet is usually fine but occasionally unreliable. Also, a couple years ago
we lost power for almost a week. So I think there is still a good reason for
some people to keep a land line for backup/emergency purposes.

~~~
manyxcxi
We had a land line for a while as it actually LOWERED our overall bill with
Comcast, but we only ever had the fax machine plugged into it or used it to
call our missing cell phones. The problem I see about the emergency backup
situation is that if we lost power for more than a few hours, our phone
wouldn't work either because the battery backup would eventually die in the
modem. The same was true of our old FiOS install at the last place (though the
battery was much larger and not in the modem, at the fiber junction). So if
you don't have an old copper phone line that doesn't need power from your
house, what's the point of even having a landline 'in case of emergency'?

~~~
mikestew
Seems to me you're describing VoIP, not a landline. It also seems that the
definition has shifted. So is landline still POTS, or does VoIP from your
cable provider count?

~~~
pki
Don't telcos also do this? IIRC Verizon's voice service is over FTTx/VOIP

------
stanmancan
We use our cell phones for all actual calls, but about 6 months ago decided to
get a copper telephone line to the house in case of emergencies. I don't even
recall what our landlines number is. Nice to know we can still place a call if
the power goes out.

~~~
morganvachon
In general, you don't have to have a subscription to a landline service to
have 911 access on POTS. Federal law requires the phone companies to provide
access to 911 dialed from a landline phone whether there is current service or
not, and they have to ensure the line from the pole to the house/apartment is
live to facilitate this (it is still the homeowner's responsibility to deal
with the in-house wiring, of course).

That said, if you live in one of the increasing number of states trying to
circumvent these federal requirements, you may indeed have to keep paying just
to have emergency access, or you may end up being forced out of landline
access altogether:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-
rul...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-rules-
frustrate-telecoms/2012/04/12/gIQAG2XvDT_story.html)

~~~
jsjohnst
Same with cell phones. 911 access works even without active cell service.

------
rapala
The percentage of households with a landline was quite shocking. Based on
quick googling the percentage here in Finland is ~11%. Gives perspective to
the pricing of internet services in the USA vs Europe.

~~~
scott_karana
Multiple reasons.

(And they pretty much boil down to: "why put hundreds/thousands of expensive
cell towers in the sparsely populated cornfields and plains that cover the
country")\

1) The USA is geographically _massive_. Infrastructure between isolated
"neighbouring" cities can be hundreds of kilometers. Cell towers, needless to
say, are more expensive when attempting to cover a larger geographical area.

2) The population density varies dramatically

3) There are many rural pockets of thinly-distributed populaces, which can
make the ROI lower in aforementioned large coverage areas

4) There are many mountainous, isolated communities, whose topography
negatively affects coverage

5) Unlike Finland, where coastal/southern communities contain the vast
majority of the populace, and nobody living up north,[1] the US Midwest
contains a large populace, thinly spread over an enormous area... [2]

Copper landlines are reliable and simple to fix.

Cellphone towers are expensive, have a limited range, are highly affected by
topography, and thus only make sense in areas above a certain threshold of
population densities. And even still, living in a _neighbouring community_ of
a metropolitan area, you may be out of range of the metro's cell towers, and
the ROI for your smaller community may not justify the expense!

1
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland#/media...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland#/media/File:Population_map_of_Finland.svg)

2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_states_showing_pop...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_states_showing_population_density_in_2013.svg)

Size comparison:
[http://overlapmaps.com/index.php](http://overlapmaps.com/index.php), or
[http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/US/FI](http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/US/FI)

------
legulere
I wonder how the number of people with only with mobile Internet is
developing. It's definitely doable with LTE today. However the problem are
traffic intensive things: Videos, Updates, Audio

~~~
mschuster91
Go to Finland. 17€ for over 150GB and counting LTE. A friend of mine is
studying there and I thought she was joking me - I get 3GB 3G traffic and a
call flat for 25€ in Germany.

------
euroclydon
This was a a pretty lame article. Correlating binge drinking with lack of
landlines -- what?

How about the correlation between longer 911 response times with lack of
landlines? Now that would be interesting.

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mhb
I'm pretty surprised that the better quality of the actual sound of a call on
a landline is seldom (at least here) given as a reason for keeping/preferring
a landline.

~~~
pki
I've always had mobile sound a lot better. This might vary by location or
provider?

~~~
ams6110
For me, landline (POTS) is better than cell. However VoIP on either wifi or
wired network is generally much better than either.

------
pkaye
How come the graph accounts for only 97% of the people?

~~~
darshan
The obvious answer is phonelessness. Sure enough, that's what the paper linked
to in the article says: 3.4% of households surveyed did not have a phone.

[http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20151...](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201512.pdf)

------
nissehulth
[http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations](http://tylervigen.com/spurious-
correlations) does have some interesting correlations too. For example,
[http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28580](http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28580)

~~~
thaumasiotes
The site has plenty of good ones, but that one's not interesting at all. The
correlation between any two data series _consisting of two points each_ is ±1
by definition.

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backtoyoujim
As of 2013 only 17.8% US adults smoked.

What is this article on about?

~~~
nissehulth
17% of americans read a newspaper every day. Now if only we knew if they all
smoke and if they have a landline.

------
0898
Am I the only one who parses CDC as Cult of the Dead Cow?

------
kawera
Dupe detector?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684054)

