Mobile network outages can take down networks for hours, leaving us stranded without one of our most critical lines of access to the world. What good is a smartphone if it can't phone, especially in an emergency? Earlier this year, an AT&T outage took down services for more than 12 hours in many of the most populous cities in the US. And earlier this month, a Verizon outage caused some customers to be stuck in SOS mode for a large part of the day.
These outages serve as a reminder of the perils of relying only on mobile phones . And it may have made many people rethink the place of a home device that used to be standard issue but is now nearly obsolete: the landline telephone. Remember the landline? Those old-fashioned landlines may still have a place, but only 28% of American households have one.
Landlines are telephones that connect to specialized wiring in our homes. The iconic image is that of a rotary-dial phone -- usually rented from the phone company -- that either hung on the wall or sat on a counter or table, though push-button and later cordless landlines replaced many of those oldsters in the 1980s. Landline phones connect to one another through a global communication network that was built over more than a century.
But as cellphones became broadly available and affordable, many people chose to drop their landlines altogether. A 2022 survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that only about 29% of US adults lived in a house with a landline p.