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I just became a cell-only household. I didn't use my landline much–not for long distance, not for Internet service. I really didn't see a reason to continue keeping the account.
According to this recent study Pew/Internet: Polling in the ago of the cell phone being cell-only means I'm likely to fall into this demographic:
Among the most notable and interesting findings in our analysis are that, compared to those we reach on landlines, the people we contact on their cell phones are:- younger (more likely to be age 30 or under)
- more likely to be minorities
- more likely to tell us their household income.
Hmmm. I'm not under 30, not a minority, and my household income is none of your damn business. I know the information that Pew/Internet is reporting about is related to their phone polling and to overall trends.
I have a number of friends who are over 30, non-minority, who are cell-only families. On the other hand, I have an older friend who can't figure out how to find the contact list in her cell phone in order to call someone whose number she has not memorized. So, as with the case of the Senior PC, I think the cell-only phenomena is a trend related to overall cell phone acceptance throughout every age and social level, and not so much about age, ethnicity or income.
An article in The Washington Post Our Cells, Ourselves reported that
From essentially zero, we've passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history -- faster even than the polio vaccine.
The article goes on to say that soon 5 out of the 6 billion people on the planet will have a cell phone. My question is, how many of these 5 billion people are going to consider it necessary to pay a second phone bill for a landline?
Are all 5 billion going to be as frustrated as I am with cell phone plan restrictions?
Photo by Kevin Rosseel
My big issue with plulling the plug is I'm stuck dealing only with a cell phone company. For example, much as I'd like to have an iPhone, I'd owe my current company over $200 to get out of my deal with them and switch to ATT. I think we need to change the way the phone companies keep us in a strangle-hold while we're switching to cell-only households. In Free the Cell Phone by Jennifer Granick at Wired. She uses a fake company in her example:
Like most U.S. cellular providers, CellPhoneCo electronically locks the handsets it sells so the phones can only be used with CellPhoneCo's service. CellPhoneCo claims that the sale of unlocking software is illegal.
. . . a burgeoning market has developed for unlocking software that allows customers to modify their phones to accept signals from the service provider of their choice.
Here, CellPhoneCo is making a novel argument: that it can stop a business with which it has no contractual relationship from selling software that customers might use for these purposes. Does CellPhoneCo have a legal right to squelch unlocking software?
This is an interesting legal issue. No one can force you to have a particular landline (or VOIP) contract. Yet, once you have a cell phone, you have all sorts of restrictions about what you can do with it. This is because the cell phone company sells you a phone at a discount and then expects to recoup the loss by making you stay with them for at least two years. To get different treatment, should we start paying full price for our phones so we could do as we wanted with them? Would you pay $400 instead of $200 for your phone if you didn't get tethered to a contract that would cost you $200 to get out of?
Do the cell phone people think consumers are too stupid to figure out that they end up paying full price for the phone anyway if they fulfill the contract terms?
I can go to Target and buy a landline phone that I can carry all over the country, plug into the wall, and use. There's nothing about that phone that requires a single phone company's service to make it work. More importantly, I don't have to worry about whether or not I have coverage in my house. BlogHer Contributing Editor Laura
