The New York Times

August 29, 2002

When the Cellphone Is the Home Phone

By SIMON ROMERO

WHEN my wife and I moved recently from the Upper West Side of Manhattan
to a larger apartment in Harlem, it was a short hop on the map.
Technologically, however, it was a journey to the heart of the current
turmoil in the telecommunications industry.

Of all the troubles associated with a move, we expected phone service to
be the least of them: a routine order for a telephone line and two jacks.
But when I called Verizon Communications, our local phone company, I was
told that it would take a week and a half to fulfill the request, at a
cost of $250.

Other companies now offer local phone service, but they would need to
have authorization from Verizon to make a connection to our apartment. So
faced with unanticipated cost and delay, we took a step that would have
been unthinkable just a few years ago: we decided to abandon conventional
phone service altogether ? and we are not alone.

In what may be the start of an alarming trend for the nation's largest
telephone companies, the total number of business and residential
telephone lines declined last year for the first time since the
Depression ? to 192.3 million at year's end from 192.6 million a year
earlier, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

Those who follow the industry attribute the land-line decline in small
part to the general economic doldrums, while some consumers have dropped
second lines as they switched to cable modem or D.S.L. for Internet
access. But tellingly, a small but growing number of consumers, many of
them students or recent college graduates, have abandoned land-line
telephones altogether in favor of wireless service. Nearly 3 percent of
telephone users have made wireless phones their primary telephone,
according to the Yankee Group, a telecommunications consulting company in
Boston. So far the shift is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but
that is likely to change, said Keith Mallinson, an analyst at the Yankee
Group.

"It is more like gradual displacement than a complete eclipse," Mr.
Mallinson said. "But the disruptive effect of substituting land lines is
likely to become more far-reaching during the next few years."

Joel Kamm, a graphic designer in Waltham, Mass., uses a cable modem for
his Internet connection and depends on a cellphone for the rest of his
communication.

"I moved around so much in recent years, so getting a new phone line
installed in each place was a hassle," said Mr. Kamm, 28, who gave up his
conventional phone line two years ago. "This is the right solution for
anyone that moves frequently."

One cellular company, Leap Wireless of San Diego, is at the forefront of
this trend. Its Cricket service allows unlimited incoming and outgoing
local wireless calls. Leap said last month that its customer research
showed that a quarter of the 1.4 million Cricket subscribers did not have
traditional phone lines at home.

Jennifer LeHockey, a 24-year-old Cricket customer in Westminster, Colo.,
said she had canceled her land line the day she got wireless service,
cutting her monthly phone bills from about $90 to less than $50.

"I was just sick and tired of forking over so much money every month to
Qwest," said Ms. LeHockey, a hair stylist. "As a single person, just
having a cellphone was right for me."

Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said the decline in the number of land
lines was no surprise. "The old telephone company measure of access lines
is less accurate today as a measure of a company's health," Mr. Rabe
said. Large local phone companies like Verizon are seeking to compensate
for the decline in conventional phone lines by investing in the wireless
and Internet access businesses, he said.

Still, the decline may be evidence of a fundamental change in the
telecommunications landscape.

"It's a behavioral shift from the last hundred years in which we called a
geographical place and got a person," said Jeff Kagan, an independent
telecommunications analyst in Atlanta. "We're now moving to a model of
calling a person ? regardless of geography. The consequences of such a
change could be profound."

In my own case, there was confusion over the location of our apartment
(vacant for several years before it was renovated, it had disappeared
from Verizon's records) and a misunderstanding about how long it would
take the company's technicians to install the line and jacks that my wife
and I urgently needed, since we both work from home some of the time.

Both issues were later cleared up (a Verizon spokesman said the company
would have listed our apartment in its computer system if we had ordered
service; he also said the installation would most likely have taken three
days, the average in Manhattan). But my wife and I could not afford to
wait before settling our telephone service arrangements.

We decided to use our two wireless phones from Sprint for local and
domestic long-distance calling. Time Warner Cable installed a high-speed
Internet connection in two days. We make international calls using an
Internet service, Net2Phone, whose rates are cheaper than what Verizon
charged in our previous service plan. All told, we figure we're saving
about $50 a month by not having a local telephone line, on top of the
installation charge.

Relying on cellphones for voice communications has quirks both good and
bad. My wife has her voice mail available on her cellphone instead of an
answering machine or a voice mail system tethered to a land line at home.
She no longer goes straight for the answering machine upon arriving home.

The divisions between home and work and nearly everywhere else we take
our mobile phones are also blurred. Family or friends may now reach us in
a supermarket or on the street, instead of in our apartment, which is
quieter, and sometimes the background noise confuses the caller.

Cellphones, as nearly everyone who has one knows, are far from perfect in
terms of service. Calls are impossible to make from areas known as dead
zones, whereas service on a traditional line is almost always infallible.

There are other drawbacks. Wireless calls tend to drop more often than
calls on land lines, as Tracie Jacobs, a customer service representative
in Orlando, Fla., who gave up her land line two years ago, has
experienced.

"Cellphones are not perfect, but it's worth the $90 we save each month,"
said Ms. Jacobs, 33. She and her husband had two traditional phone lines,
one for a dial-up Internet connection, before disconnecting both to go
with two cellphones and a cable modem connection.

For those whose wireless providers do not offer unlimited local calls,
there is a risk that cellphone bills will be higher than those for
conventional telephone service.

"Widespread unmetered local calling would really be the catalyst for
wireless substitution to take off," said Paul Melton, an analyst at
Telegeography in Washington.

For the time being, however, these imperfections are part of the
give-and-take involved in severing dependence on a traditional phone
line. Our apartment, minus two telephone jacks and land-line phone, is
testimony to that.


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