March of mobiles spells end of landline telephone

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Picture: submitted

A poll of 2,000 adults found 28 per cent cannot even recall their home phone number, while 51 per cent said they now use the landline “rarely” or “never” for both incoming and outgoing calls.

Once the preferred method for contacting loved ones, Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell’s famed device is not even kept plugged in by one in ten people.

The first phone call was made by Bell on 10 March, 1876.

• The other inventions of Alexander Graham Bell

Making regular personal calls emerged as only the fifth reason to keep a landline telephone, with the need for an internet connection named as top priority instead, the poll by Relish Broadband found.

University of Edinburgh technology professor James Stewart said mobile phones are now the handsets of choice in households, and this has had an effect on family life.

He said: “One aspect of the landline phone is that it is a shared phone which helps to bring a family together; people take messages for each other or conduct conversations within earshot of each other.

“The mobile is a personal phone which changes the whole dynamic of communicating with the outside world. It has changed in particular how parents survey their children and who they are interacting with.

“Now parents might have no idea about who their children are speaking with.”

He added: “The landline is seen by many of the younger generation as an irrelevance and a memento of bygone days.

“If they are aware of it at all, then it is only as a way to connect to broadband.

“Added to this, you have the fact that when people are asked to give a phone number these days, they are far more likely to provide their mobile than their landline, which means when it [the landline] rings, people automatically think it must be an unwanted call.”

It is, therefore, no surprise that, according to the study, an unanswered phone is the norm for 35 per cent of adults who said they “always” or “usually” ignored their landline when it rang. The reason given by most was that they expected a sales or nuisance call.

Will Harnden, chief marketing officer at Relish, said: “If we choose to ignore our home phones or don’t even keep one, we are likely to be wasting money on unused line rental on top of the monthly broadband fee.

“It seems like now is the time to wave goodbye to the landline.”

The research also showed that just one in five people uses their landline for making regular personal calls, with the typical landline now used only eight times every month.

Meanwhile, it was found that the average adult remembers only four landline numbers from memory.

Almost four in ten of the phone users surveyed said they did not want to keep their landline anymore.