It's interesting that the article doesn't address this, but the reason I think that relying only on cellphones without a landline is risky has to do with emergency situations, and for some reason I thought the CDC would tie into that, but maybe I've just been watching too much of the walking dead.<p>In the case of a cellphone-only household, it's really easy to think of a time when all of the cellphone holders are not present, so that there's no real contact into or out of the house, potentially with people present. In the case of a 911 situation like someone choking or having a heart attack (or a fire) that could come down to going up and down the street knocking on a neighbor's door, or jumping in a sedan to race to the hospital.<p>I also wonder how accurate geo-location would be for 911 calls, where it's very easy (I would hope) for 911 operators to know the exact street address of someone making an emergency call, even if they ask for the address as well.
I don't smoke and rarely drink, but we're also considering dropping our landline. Mainly because we rarely use it, few people ever call us on it, the phone itself is crap, and we don't care enough to replace it with a properly working phone.<p>A friend has dropped his landline ages ago, but he does enjoy drinking a good whisky, and he even smokes occasionally.
My wife & I were wireless-only until we had our first child.<p>It turns out 911 is handled very differently (at least in California). If I were to call 911 from my landline I'm connected to our local dispatch & my address is automatically sent. If I were to call from our cell phones, only the cell tower is sent (and <i>maybe</i> that), and the call is routed through a statewide system.<p>I hope to never have to actually call, but figured it's worth the small fee if seconds matter.<p>That said, it still seems backwards. My cell phone has GPS coordinates. I would hope that someone in the not-too-distant-future we can make calling 911 as good (if not better) on a cell phone.
Here I thought I was going to find CDC secretly studying the effects of cell phone exposure on people's health and behavior. Would've been fun and controversial. Gotta be something boring I guess.
For those interested in digging into the facts and data, this FCC document is actually pretty good and no white wash in my view: <a href="https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet65/oet65b.pdfhttps://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet65/oet65b.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Do...</a>
I hope that link works but you can google the title "Evaluating Compliance with FCC Guidelines for Human Exposure to Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields" and it comes right up.
There are some interesting tables and graphs for the TL;DR
Figure 1 on page 30, shows the relationship between distance and ERP to the power density. Then Table 1, Page 72. Most cell phones operate in the .6 - 2.5 Ghz range and the power is ~ 100mw range.
Cell towers operate at about 40 - 60 W ERP, the distance depends on where you are.
Contrary to my paranoid reading of the title, I get from the article that the CDC does not individually <i>track</i> wireless-only households. They are apparently just looking at aggregate statistics. However, I do wonder whether they retain any individualized data.
I have a hard time seeing how they can control for age in their analysis of this trait, as I'm not aware of a single person under 30 who has a landline, or any intention of ever acquiring one.
The mind blowing fact is people still pay for long distance calls on landlines and it's not cheap.<p>Free internet calls have not only existed for years but you can even get free cell service these days with services like ringplus.<p>So landlines are the new AOL users (and probably a huge intersection at that).
We use our cell phones for all actual calls, but about 6 months ago decided to get a copper telephone line to the house in case of emergencies. I don't even recall what our landlines number is. Nice to know we can still place a call if the power goes out.
The percentage of households with a landline was quite shocking. Based on quick googling the percentage here in Finland is ~11%. Gives perspective to the pricing of internet services in the USA vs Europe.
I wonder how the number of people with only with mobile Internet is developing. It's definitely doable with LTE today. However the problem are traffic intensive things: Videos, Updates, Audio
This was a a pretty lame article. Correlating binge drinking with lack of landlines -- what?<p>How about the correlation between longer 911 response times with lack of landlines? Now that would be interesting.
I'm pretty surprised that the better quality of the actual sound of a call on a landline is seldom (at least here) given as a reason for keeping/preferring a landline.
<a href="http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations" rel="nofollow">http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations</a> does have some interesting correlations too. For example,
<a href="http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28580" rel="nofollow">http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28580</a>