Americans getting rid of second phone lines
SAN JOSE--U.S. households are beginning to dump their second phone lines. But that isn't necessarily bad news for the telecom industry because they are replacing them with alternative, feature-rich, higher-priced communications equipment, according to Dataquest.
Nearly 6% of all U.S. households replaced a traditional telephony access line with alternative communications equipment during the first half of this year, according to a Dataquest survey.
"A significant segment of these additional residence lines were never used for voice communications but rather for dial-up Internet access and faxing, so they were a natural market for upward migration to newly available and affordable forms of data communications," reports analyst Peggy Schoener. The growing mobile nature of society coupled with competitively priced wireless offerings has reduced the need for multiple wired access lines for voice communications, she says.
Some 55% of the residence access lines replaced since January migrated to high-speed broadband access, the Datquest survey shows. The migration of almost 4 million dial-up lines to higher-priced broadband Internet access has "significant revenue implications" for those service providers capturing the broadband customer.
Most of these voice lines replaced by broadband migrated to local exchange carrier (ILEC) high-speed residential services. DSL is the most popular choice.
The number of wireless phones in U.S. households has reached a critical mass and continues to grow, Dataquest says. Some 64.3 million households have at least one wireless phone available in the household, the survey shows. This represents nearly 61% of all households, increasing from 50% reported 16 months earlier.
Those households replacing their residence access line, 2.3 million or 33% of the lines were replaced with a cellular/PCS phone. The bundled pricing plans, free minutes, and other promotions have made wireless calling prices competitive with, and in some cases better than, wireline calling rates, Schoener says. |
