
The Daredevils Without Landlines and Why Health Experts Are Tracking Them - kawera
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/12/03/458225197/the-daredevils-without-landlines-and-why-health-experts-are-tracking-them
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dmatthewson
From the article, the CDC finds reduced landline use correlated with smoking
and drinking, and thus poor health outcomes. There's a sort of inference that
one has to do with the other.

Many pay as you go cell plans can cost less than land plans, especially with
all the taxes and fees. It's a luxury to own both. Therefore poor people, who
are more likely to smoke, are thus more likely to both smoke and have only a
cell phone.

Regarding drinking the correlation is that people who only have a landline
binge drink less. This is clearly because the tiny 8% that have land line only
are mostly much older retired and rural people who just are not part of the
cell phone generations. Binge drinking is correlated with youth and so this
metric follows from age and not phone use.

Not having a land line does not cause people to smoke or drink, nor is not
having a landline a dangerous daredevil maneuver. It's an economic one. And
having only a landline is a factor of age demographics.

In my own case I can certainly afford both but I only have a cell because the
land line has constant heavy static making it useless for understanding
speech, and since phone lines are now shared responsibility of many companies,
none take responsibility for fixing them. Equipment falls apart and falls into
disrepair. Service calls take weeks of calls to get done and the service
personnel have to come in from out of state and are incompetent and incapable
of fixing problems. As a result, no one in my entire area maintains their land
line any more since none of our phone lines work.

It's an infrastructure issue just like decaying and falling apart bridges.
Cell reception just works and is cheaper. However my case and that of my
neighbors, that of decaying infrastructure is possibly atypical or a minority
reason for cell phone only use compared to the income and age reasons of
others.

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goodJobWalrus
I haven't had a landline since 2000, so I'm not really up to date with this
stuff, but I assumed that what is being referred as a 'land line' today is
really a VoIP home phone.

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pixl97
>but I assumed that what is being referred as a 'land line' today is really a
VoIP home phone.

That does bring a few interesting questions. Does a land line count as a

1\. Copper pair from the telephone company, or other fully dedicated digital
service?

2\. Hybrid service, such as VoIP to a provided CPE such as service commonly
provided by cable companies?

3\. VoIP only services that can be run on any compatible wired or wireless
device?

Number 1 is going away as fast as possible, and just about everyone wants the
service to go away too, it is massively expensive to operate from a value
proposition. There are a few users who do rely on its ability to keep working
under failure conditions such as mass power outages and that equipment using
it has been around quite some time and is well tested.

Number 2 is the most common new rollout I see the work environments I am
around. The cable company offers service at less than half the cost of the
telco here. No long distance fees and fast provisioning have lead to massive
migration from businesses looking at reducing communications costs and
consolidating their communications billing by one invoice or more.

