Have We Witnessed the Death of the Landline?

There are many of us who may not even have a landline in our home. Particularly the younger generation, who are forever connected and intertwined with one another through social media sites, mobile phone apps and text messaging. Now that mobile phone tariffs are perhaps cheaper than they have ever been and nearly everybody owns a personal mobile phone, landlines may perhaps be considered redundant, and rightly so. But have we lost something special along with the landline?
We now live in a generation where things may seem more connected, as I described in the paragraph above, but the truth is that today’s generation is so fast paced that people seldom have time to talk. Office colleagues email one another when they’re sitting a room apart, families interact on social media sites, children send their parents text messages. More contact is good though, right? It’s really more to do with quality of contact rather than frequency. So much more can be conveyed in a personal telephone call and they are, arguably, far more effective methods of communication than a brief email or text message.
Thankfully, landlines haven’t gone the way of the dinosaurs. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite. Landlines are flourishing, particularly in business, and the preferred method of contact for business meetings and the collaboration of ideas is still the good old landline. You’d be hard pushed to find a business office out there that didn’t have a hard landline on each desk for reaching out to customers, using internal intercom, and hooking up to conference calls. We see less of landlines because ordinary individuals have increasingly little use for them. Quite often they’re installed in a home and seldom get used because people prefer their mobile phones and multi-functionality and ease of use.
Another bonus for landlines is the infrastructure. There are many rural parts of the UK where mobile phones simple would not receive any coverage and text message, emails and phone calls would be near impossible. The landline network has been established for decades and it’s possible to receive a crystal clear phone call through a landline in the most remote of places. Security is another huge advantage of landline use. If an emergency call was to come through on a landline it would be quite possible to determine where that phone call was coming from and dispatch help immediately. This is something which isn’t always possible with a mobile phone.
So while landlines my seem dead, the truth is they’re alive and well, and flourishing in rural areas and businesses up and down the country.

Martin Groves is an entrepreneur and environmentalist who also has a keen eye on the telecommunications industry.