According to 2016 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers say that at least half of all homes today in the U.S. do not have a landline.
It's estimated that at least 51 percent have said goodbye to their landline phones. And finding a landline now feels like it has become as rare as trying to find a public payphone or VCR. Many people today have tossed the landline aside and instead are opting for cellphones.
According to the same study, researchers also suggest that for those who are going wireless, they are also more likely to binge-drink, smoke, and be uninsured. They aren't sure why there is a correlation but they think that income might have something to do with it.
The CDC has been collecting this data for several years now as part of its National Health Interview Survey. It doesn't specifically ask why people might be giving up their landlines but it does seek to find out whether they are using one or not.
There are still some people who prefer to use a landline because they haven't become familiar with using a cellphone yet, and there are others who have stuck with their landline for various reasons.
Some say that it is required as part of their internet service, others say they get bad cellphone reception from time to time, and some say that it offers them cheaper package discounts to get the landline bundled with other services.
When it comes to the benefits that landline phones offer compared to cellphones, there are some differences. For example, in various emergency situations sometimes landlines would be working when cellphones would not. But not all landlines are the same, depending on their technology and configuration, so they all wouldn't perform the same in those various emergency situations. And not every landline guarantees emergency service in the event that the phone gets disconnected.
Also, when emergency services are using a landline to trace a location of someone who is calling for help, they can allegedly track the person much better when using a landline trace as opposed to using GPS to locate their whereabouts.
But thanks to phones that have become equipped with better GPS technology over the years though, emergency service agents these days say that they can sometimes locate someone within just a minute or two if they are using a cellphone to call for help.
There are pros and cons with both, and for many folks they just don't see the reason in keeping around a landline that might be costing them something like $500 a year or more for something that they aren't even using. But there will always be those who prefer to keep the landline around as a backup option for when their cellphone fails them.
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Sources:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/05/04/americans-hang-landlines-cellphone-homes-dominate/SLs1TOuSeh363MTh64FOPP/story.html
http://fortune.com/2017/05/04/cut-landline-phone-service/
https://www.statista.com/chart/2072/landline-phones-in-the-united-states/
http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/911-Dispatchers-Use-New-Technologies-to-Quickly-Locate-Cellphone-Callers.html
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/07/why-calling-911-on-your-cell-is-not-always-a-good-idea.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/your-money/weighing-the-need-for-a-landline-in-a-cellphone-world.html
https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/symantec-cyber-education/will-my-phone-work-during-power-outage-depends