Have We Witnessed the Death of the Landline?

There are many of us who may not already have a landline in our home. Particularly the younger generation, who are forever connected and intertwined with one another by social media sites, mobile phone apps and text messaging. Now that mobile phone tariffs are perhaps cheaper than they have ever been and nearly everybody owns a personal mobile phone, landlines may perhaps be considered redundant, and rightly so. But have we lost something special along with the landline?

We now live in a generation where things may seem more connected, as I described in the use above, but the truth is that todays generation is so fast paced that people seldom have time to talk. Office colleagues email one another when theyre sitting a room apart, families interact on social media sites, children send their parents text messages. More contact is good though, right? Its really more to do with quality of contact instead of frequency. So much more can be conveyed in a personal telephone call and they are, arguably, far more effective methods of communication than a fleeting email or text message.

Thankfully, landlines havent gone the way of the dinosaurs. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite. Landlines are thriving, particularly in business, and the preferred method of contact for business meetings and the collaboration of ideas is nevertheless the good old landline. Youd be hard pushed to find a business office out there that didnt have a hard landline on each desk for reaching out to customers, using internal intercom, and hooking up to conference calls. We see less of landlines because ordinary individuals have increasingly little use for them. Quite often theyre installed in a home and seldom get used because people prefer their mobile phones and multi-functionality and ease of use.

Another bonus for landlines is the infrastructure. There are many rural parts of the UK where mobile phones simple would not receive any coverage and text message, emails and phone calls would be near impossible. The landline network has been established for decades and its possible to receive a crystal clear phone call by a landline in the most far away of places. Security is another huge advantage of landline use. If an emergency call was to come by on a landline it would be quite possible to determine where that phone call was coming from and dispatch help closest. This is something which isnt always possible with a mobile phone.

So while landlines my seem dead, the truth is theyre alive and well, and thriving in rural areas and businesses up and down the country.