Do You Still Need a Land Line?

Is there really any reason to maintain a plain-old telephone line? Increasingly, the answer is no.

Citigroup’s Michael Rollins wrote a report today which takes a look at the state of the “teleconomy,” and provides some interesting tidbits:

• The telcos continue to lose residential phone subscribers to both cable VoIP and wireless subscriptions at a steady 7%-8% a year.
• By 2010, wireless-only households should rise to 27%, from 13% last year and an estimated 17% this year.
• Cable VoIP penetration should jump from 10% last year and an estimated 14% this year to 25% by 2010.
• Wireless penetration should rise from an estimated 83% this year to 87% by the end of 2008.
• Consumer telephony is only 22% of overall telco revenue.

Despite those trends, Rollins has Buy ratings on AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ) and Embarq (EQ).

AT&T is holding a meeting with analysts tomorrow. Rollins expects a focus on growth drivers in its enterprise and wireless businesses, as well as new detail on its IPTV strategy.

Ahead of the meeting, AT&T Tuesday was down 65 cents to $37.82.

Comments

[vboring]

information wants to be free.

my wife works in a skype-only office under the auspices of a large, slow university employer. our house only has one copper connection - for power. all information transfer is wireless. no cable tv, no land line, no cable internet access.

we're one mesh network away from freedom from corporate "service"

[Riz]

We didn't have one until we hooked up an alarm system in our house. It was much more cost effective to add a land line than to use the cellphone solution ADT provides. And since we had FIOS internet, we just added the phone service which is almost the same price as Vonage. Almost with the same crappy customer service as they all have.

[vboring]

the Free the Net project in San Francisco by Meraki and Google suggests that even cell phone companies and ISPs have reason to be fearful:

sf.meraki.com/overview