Have Landlines in Service Actually Decreased?

Just about everybody assumes that landlines in service have declined over the last seven or eight years. To be sure, if one looks at Federal Communications Commission data, there is a net loss of about 34 million access lines between the end of 2000 and the end of 2007, though there has been significant shift of market share from incumbents to cable TV and competitive local exchange carriers.

But there are some facts one wouldn't immediately see. Wired broadband connections increased by more than 65 million over the same time frame. And business lines in service likewise increased, despite technological substitution of broadband for narrowband lines.

So one has to differentiate between lines that shifted to new providers, lines that shifted from narrowband to broadband and lines that shifted to over-the-top providers (A customer buying an over-the-top VoIP service is still a wired voice customer, even if a "line" appears to be gone.

If one assumes that the roughly three million U.S. VoIP lines are active, revenue-generating wired voice lines, the market as a whole lost about 31 million lines, for all reasons, between 2000 and the beginning of 2008.

Broadband lines in service grew from perhaps five million in 2000 to about 65.4 million in 2007. Even if every broadband line represented the loss of a narrowband line, overall lines in service clearly have grown.