More than half of American homes don't use a landline
Aaron Amat/Shutterstock.com
With the ascent of mobile, landlines dip back to World War II-era penetration.
We all knew this day was coming: According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control(which tracks these sorts of things for its phone surveys), more than half of American households (51.7 percent) don't regularly use a landline phone. The majority of those (35.8 percent) don't have a land line at all and another 15.9 percent have the line, but say they don't use them very often if ever.
The shift away from landlines toward mobile is happening very quickly. In the four years that the survey covers, the percent of households that have a landline but no wireless service has dropped from 17.4 to 9.4 and the percent that are wireless only has leapt up from 20.2 to 35.8.
As Derek Thompson showed last year, the rate of technology adoption has generally increased over the the past century. It took landlines until 1975 to achieve the prevalence that mobile has today (about 90 percent).
(Image via Aaron Amat/Shutterstock.com)