Ways to Replicate the World\'s 10 Most Amazing Network Failures

Ars had an editorial today giving a captivating statistic: 20% of all U.S. households rely exclusively on mobile phones and feature no land lines.

The main groups that make up that 20% are youth aged 18-29, one third of which can be cell-phone-only, and adults that share housing, of which 60% use only mobile phones. Additionally 25% of all Hispanics are also wireless-only.

Their data is good, but their conclusions overlook the obvious. Ars says the groups that make up the 20% are “lower income.” That may be true, and the reasoning is solid: tech-savvy youth are adopting the trend, Hispanics are traditonally lower income, and the logic holds that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay for a landline if you can use a cell phone.

But for some reason, I’m guessing the writer of the article is a 40-something, U.S.-native, home owner long removed from the process of moving and sharing housing. Because economics and tech-savvy aren’t the only reasons why renters and youth rely on cellphones. I think mobility and privacy are actually the deciding factors, at least from my experiencebeing one of those 29-year-old renters who exclusively uses a cell.

If you’re sharing housing, having your own phone means you don’t have to rely on roommates to give you messages, and your roommates don’t hear your personal messages. And even in the event you don’t share housing, but you’re young or renting, you’re more likely to be moving from apartment to apartment every few years. It’s not always your choicea landlord can just decide to kick you out so their friends can move in to your apartment. It’s happened to me.

If you buy into a landline, then you have to go through the hassle of calling the phone company, resetting the wires, and telling all your friends about your new phone number when you move. If you have a cellphone, it’s no hassle and no change whether you move down the block or across the country, your friends still have your number and you still have theirs.

It was nice of Ars to notice the socioeconomic issue in this case, that renters, Hispanics, and youth are traditionally lower income. But if you ask many cell-only homes, many might say that a new landline would not be high on their list of their priorities if they did have money.  Instead, the fact is that these groups are more mobile, move more often, and share living spaces with a greater number of peopleso, they have different needs out of a phone service.

Case in point — in the last 6 years, since I’ve been out of college, I’ve moved 6 times, but not regularly once a year. Sometimes 10 months, sometimes 6, sometimes 18. I finally got a cell phone when I had to move from Santa Cruz to the South SF Bay area for work, and I needed a cell phone to call prospective housemates and landlords from Craigslist. Since then, I only had a landline once, when it was already installed in my new apartment because my housemate had set up DSL. Neither of us ever used the phone and it couldn’t make long distance calls.  Since I got a cell phone, I’ve had the same phone number and it hasn’t been a hassle.

In fact, you’ll find that a growing number of youth and renters like me are not low-income groups. Affording to buy a condo or home has become cost-prohibitive, whether or not you make a decent wage, and jobs are not as secure as they once were. In this recession, people are valuing mobility because they may ought to move to find work. Many young people and adults bounce from jobs to jobs every few years. However, loan agents often won’t take people unless they can show they have got worked for a similar employer for the last few yearseven if they have made a steady, sufficient wage at a steady stream of jobs, as many youth have. Within the age of pink slips and residential foreclosures, fewer and less people can afford homes, and a growing number of people will value and insist mobility.

And, further and further people of all stripes will probably come to look that their land lines are obsolete.