The landline is a dying breed. This decade, across the country, many families have shifted away from landlines in favor of wireless solutions. My own family moved on from the landline in 2010. If not for my summer vacations to India, I would have no idea what a wired telephone even looks like.
Here is a graph of the landline’s steady decline in the US:
Wireless solutions have grown linearly this decade. Correspondingly, landlines have decreased linearly. At its peak in 2000, over 90% of US households had a landline. That number has dwindled to below 40% today, with analysts projecting extinction by 2040.
Why is that the landline failed the test of time when most other technologies passed? My answer is that the landline did not create value in the American market. Rather, the landline was born as a stopgag solution to the global communication problem. While the landline shined, researchers continued to craft broader-scale, easier-to-use solutions. When these technologies came of age, they devoured the landline, leaving behind only the bones of the once-glorious behemoth. In this article, I will study the landline’s growth and decline by segmenting and studying its timeline: the early market, the heyday, and the endgame.
The Early Market
The first landline phone was patented in 1876 by American inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Over the next century, landline phones would slowly spread across the US. One need look no further than the first transcontinental call to understand the limitations of early landline phones.
In that special moment, Alexander Graham Bell, in New York, dialed his former assistant Dr. Watson, in San Fransisco. While the call represented a huge technological breakthrough, there were limitations:
Latency: The call took 23 minutes to connect and required 5 operators.
Customer Experience: In order to call, all interested parties had to visit special stations and book advance appointments.
Cost: New connections required lots of new wire. This use of copper led to large infrastructure costs.
Price: A three-minute call in 1915 cost a whopping $500 in today’s money. This high price placed the telephone firmly in the hands of the wealthy.
Monopoly: As the only company that produced the telephone lines, AT&T had a monopoly over the US telecommunications market throughout the 1900’s. This fact allowed them to demand high prices.
Those initial problems never stopped plaguing the landline. While variations were developed that brought the original technology into the future–buttons replaced rotary dials and cordless phones replaced wired phones–the essential problem remained. Landlines were a compromise to the global communication problem.
Telephones arose to connect people’s voices across great distances. However, there is something restricting about the concept of a “home phone.” Humans use phones to communicate, which makes the phone an extension of the mind and body. Phones are bigger than any one location.
The Heyday
In its heyday, the landline took up space in over 90% of American households. However, new technologies were constantly being developed. The biggest one, of course, is the mobile phone. The first mobile phone came out in 1973–the Motorola DynaTAC. It was huge, rectangular, and cost nearly $10,000 in today’s money. But the concept behind the phone was refreshing.
The mobile phone theoretically solved the main problem of the landline. It freed the phone from the house, allowing customers to have far greater flexibility with how they communicated. Only two problems remained: form and price. Form was refined with developments in semiconductors, touchscreens, and operating systems. Price dropped as well, with cheaper machinery and labor as well as budding economies of scale.
The result was an inverse relationship: as price decreased and form increased, adoption increased. As the former two increased indefinitely, the latter did as well.
The growth of the phone placed the landline on the path to extinction.
The Endgame
Soon enough, the only place to find a landline will be in the deep crevasses of your local Fry’s Electronics and in your local antique shop. The value proposition of the landline now (as featured on most landline company websites) is that by having a landline, you (1) can be featured on the phone book and (2) have a phone ready to use for emergencies. Neither of these propositions have any clear value.
And thus, the landline comes to an end. It was never a permanent solution to communication. And as a result, it’s time for the landline to finally hang up.