The slow death of
landline phones

British government workers are getting a two-day taste of life without fixed line phones.

But how easily would the rest of us surrender our landline? You pick up the phone on your desk and there is no dialling tone. Your colleague does the same. It's a scenario repeated across the country, in a catastrophic nationwide communications failure caused by a natural disaster or cyber attack. And this week it is happening. At least, it is for civil servants. An exercise called White Noise, in which the "public switched telephone network" is disabled, is being simulated by Whitehall, in London, to test the response of government and the communications industry to such an emergency.

Similar exercises are regularly carried out for scenarios like a terror attack or a nuclear leak, and what they learn from this one will be used to improve the national communications network. For the purposes of White Noise, internet access will still be working, but if all landlines were to be knocked out in reality, much of the UK's internet access would sink with them. Could the mobile network take the strain? Are landlines really that important these days? In the domestic setting, landlines are already starting to wane. Where once mobile phones were just for people on the move, in many homes they are now the handsets of choice - the first port of call to make or receive a call.

The thrust of BT's latest advertising campaign alludes to this receding tide. Once the landline phone was an essential. Now, it's a luxury to be savoured compared with the hit-and-miss tourist class experience of chatting on a mobile. "If a conversation's worth having, use your landline," runs the strapline at the end of the TV ad.

So as the mobile internet market slowly grows, will the need for landlines disappear altogether? For many young people in rented accommodation, the idea a landline phone is already anachronistic, says Ben Highmore, a lecturer in old and new technology at University of Sussex. But within this generational divide, many people share a strong, psychological attachment to landline phones.

"Having a landline is about having a commitment to place as much as anything," says Mr Highmore, himself speaking from a landline phone. "Mobile phones are about mobility in a much deeper sense than just convenience. It's about not being rooted in the same way as a landline, which gives a feeling of stability." There's a practical benefit too, because landlines offer you the means to ring a household, rather than a person, which on some occasions may be all you need. And like many new technologies, mobiles represent a compromise in quality, because landlines offer a clearer line. "There is a terrible gee-whizzness to celebrating the new, for the sake of new." In the US, one in five homes is without a landline as more people "cut the cord" during the recession and save money. The latest wheeze for those with defunct phone sockets is a reading lamp that takes its power from the electrical charge that comes down a phone line. Research conducted for the European Commission at the end of 2007 suggested 15% of UK households had mobile phone access but were without a fixed phone line into their home, 2% up from 2006. But that's still a small proportion compared with the Czech Republic (63%) and Finland (61%), which is home to the world's biggest mobile phone maker, Nokia. One of those British householders who fits into this category is James Parker, a 27-year-old who moved into a rented flat in Chester that had no landline. Like many people, he had no fears about not having a landline to make phone calls. "My initial concern was that was fine, because I'm more than happy to use my mobile for calls. Lots of households with younger people tend to use mobile phones for calls even if they have a fixed line, because it's easier than getting up off the couch and they can send text messages." Mr Parker knows more than most about comparative costs thanks to his job at the price comparison website MoneySupermarket.com. The only concern he had about not having a landline was not having a line for broadband, but weighing up the options - and the £120 price tag of getting a line installed - he thought he could get away with mobile broadband instead.

Using a USB dongle he connects to the internet via a mobile phone network, for £15 a month. But he concedes it's not as fast as broadband down a fixed line. "It can be quite hit and miss at different times of day but I only use the internet to check e-mails, a small amount of browsing and to download the odd song. I don't download movies. It's fine for me, but if you're more than a light user then you would need to get a fixed line broadband." The experience of Mr Parker and others shows we are slowly moving away from landline dependence, says Rob Webber, commercial director at Broadband Expert, although landlines still provide much more reliable internet access. "The technology of mobile broadband has taken off in the past two years but [it] is struggling a little to keep up. "If you're lucky enough to get a strong 3G signal then the technology is fine. It's not as fast as a strong home connection but you probably get one to two megabits per second." That's ok for "everyday life" although "not really suitable for online gaming or downloading and streaming videos".

But Mr Parker thinks that could change in three to four years with the next generation of mobile telecommunications - 4G. Some being tested now achieve speeds of up to 100 megabits per second. "Once that technology does arrive, then people will just ditch their home phones, ditch their home broadband connections and just have this on a device which will provide them with broadband anywhere they go. Just like a dongle now put in a laptop or home computer." But Phil Sayer, principal analyst at Forrester Research, urges us not to start drawing up our landline cancellation requests just yet. Anyone who remembers the hype which surrounded 3G in the late 1990s will know where he's coming from.

"It's great to talk about speeds of 50 to 100 megabits but we need to walk before we can run. Rolling out another high-speed network when they haven't finished the job on the current one doesn't make a very satisfactory consumer offer for people that don't live in central London." Access to mobile broadband is useless because providers promise "up to" seven megabits per second but whether you get that depends on many variables, such as how close you are to a transmitter, how many people are also trying to use that transmitter and whether you're in a concrete-encased building like an office block. "For the service to be universally usable and to use on the move, the coverage needs to be much better than it is today. But the wider question is whether there is an incentive to improve it because no-one wants to pay more than they do." Places like Finland are way ahead because they can provide fast and reliable service, he says. Unlike the UK. If White Noise really happened and all fixed lines were disabled tomorrow, says Mr Sayer, the mobile network would simply collapse under the demand.

Source: BBC News Magazine, 12th November 2009

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