Cellular-Only Households Continue To Increase

Public safety dispatchers will be answering more cellular 911 calls in 2013, as a federal survey has found that over one-third of American households shave abandoned their wired telephones and rely only on a wireless connection. The survey results have implications for dispatchers handling 911 calls, including obtaining precise locations from cellular callers. Not surprisingly, residents in the 25 to 29 year-old age group were most likely to have a cellular-only connection, as were households composed of unrelated adults. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) performed the survey during the first six months of 2012, and found that 35.8 percent of households no longer have a wired telephone, relying instead on a cellular phone. That figure is the latest annual increase since the CDC began asking the survey question in 2008, when the figure was less than five percent. People who rent are twice as likely to have a wireless-only phone as home owners (58.2% vs. 28.2%), and those living in poverty have a higher cellular-only rate than those with higher incomes. View a graph of the annual figures after the break, and download (pdf) the survey summary here.