By Nicholas Hamner
Investment Advisor Representative
[email protected]
Chances are, everyone reading this has a cellphone of some kind. And, chances are, four out of every five of you are reading this on a smartphone. That’s not me guessing, those figures are from Pew Research statistics showing 98% of Americans own cell phones and 78% of folks over 65 have a smartphone. Pair that with CDC studies showing less than 30% of American households have a landline, and it’s pretty clear we are a mobile-first society today.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is yet to be determined. But one tricky aspect of mobile phones is reviving an old technology. When everyone has a mobile phone, nobody needs a house phone. Without a house phone, how do you teach kids how to use the phone? How do you ensure they can call for help if, God forbid, something happens to you?
This need for kids to have a method of communication—plus, a desire by parents to keep their kids away from the social media apps on smartphones—has led to a recent resurgence in landline use in the U.S. A number of journalists and politicians looking for the relative anonymity and privacy provided by landlines have also added to the landline’s rediscovered value. And while there are newer phones available in 2025, never fear. The classic AT&T Trimline phone, in all its thick plastic beige glory, can be had on Amazon for $18.95 (knotted & twisted super-long cord sold separately).
If you’re thinking that dropping the mobile line and going back to the landline may be for you, there may be a problem. The FCC told carriers they could stop maintaining their copper phone lines back in 2019. That order went into effect in 2022, and carriers took no time in dropping the copper for new customers. If you still have one, know that Verizon is trying very hard to get you to drop it.
So let’s say you cut the cord, went mobile, and now you want to go back. If carriers have killed copper, how do you get landline back in your home? You can get an adapter box from someone like Ooma for about $75 that lets you run a home phone off your internet connection. Verizon FiOS and Xfinity offer similar VOIP services, but they’re fairly pricey. And for the kids, there’s a new service using five-digit numbers, parental controls, and special tin can-shaped phones called (ugh) Tin Can rolling out this year.
When we were wanting to teach our daughter how to use the phone way back when she was in preschool, we toyed with all of those options. But, even though our whole house is wired for POTS copper lines and reconnecting at the time would have been easy, we ignored them all. We ended up buying the cheapest, most-basic cell phone we could find and stuck it on the counter. No social media, no YouTube, no privacy violations, and we made songs out of my and my wife’s phone numbers to make them easy to remember.
Now back to today, are there that many people so concerned with their children’s security & well-being, or their own privacy, that they’re willingly adding $50 or more to their data bill while at the same time making their life more inconvenient? No, and that’s why all of this comes with the caveat that while there is a measurable resurgence, there will never be widespread landline use again. Most analysts are chalking this up to the Millennial nostalgia for the disconnected world of their youth. It’s why Kodak is rereleasing 35mm cameras this year and stores are stocking cassette players again. And in a wider viewpoint, it’s the same reason Volkswagen brought back the Beetle when most of the Baby Boomers turned 40.
In summary, if you don’t have a landline and try to get one back, it would be expensive and it wouldn’t likely be a true copper landline connection. And if you do still have a landline, you now have street cred with the Millennials.