Landlines - Who Has them?
I was talking to a coworker today about having a land-line. Coincidentally, there is an article today on MSN wondering what is killing the land-line.
The article is right, the lines seem to be drawn on age boundaries. Most of my coworkers who are younger don’t ever bother with a land-line. All they need is their cellphone. Most of the older people in the office have one, but admit that they hardly if ever use it becasue of their cell phone. Unfortunatley, I fall into the latter category, although not by choice. I do have a land-line but I have it because my girlfriend uses it for work (she works from home and needs to be on a lot of conference calls). But, like most people my age, I really don’t have any need for one.
If this isn’t a reason to short stocks of telecom companies which only have land-line based businesses (Qwest comes to mind) I don’t know what is. Even those companies like AT&T and Verizon probably face pretty uncertain futures given the commodity business cell phone carriers provide. I myself have, in the past eight years, used all the major providers at one time or another. I did it because it was easy to switch (even easier now that there is number portability) and I had no reason to pick one over the other.
What will change even more in the future will be that most won’t even need a phone. Most people are just going to need something that can send a text message. While people my age may or may not use the feature very much, just go younger by about five years and it is pretty much the only form of communication used. The voice functionality of cell phones will be like the camera today. It will be on every phone, but few people will actually use that functionality.
Do you have a land-line? If so why?




I got a Samsung Blackjack 2 a few weeks ago, and I have to say I like it so far. Now I have to say one thing up front, I’ve never really had a “smart phone”. I’ve always used my phone to make phone calls. A novel idea I know. But I decided to get a phone that would allow me to check my work e-mail where I was, so I got this phone.
Figured I would follow up on my original post about trying to pick a winner between
This blog post is completely off topic, but I’m going to do that every once in a while just to keep things interesting.
