You might think that is caused by users dumping their landlines in favor of mobile-only service.
But Monaghan doesn't think wireless substitution explains much of the incumbent line loss. In fact, he says, residential home phone service has only experienced a two-percent year-over-year loss from 2005 to 2008.
That's something on the order of five million subscribers. His conclusion: Most consumers are not cutting the cord. They simply are choosing cable or other providers.
But Monaghan doesn't think wireless substitution explains much of the incumbent line loss. In fact, he says, residential home phone service has only experienced a two-percent year-over-year loss from 2005 to 2008.
That's something on the order of five million subscribers. His conclusion: Most consumers are not cutting the cord. They simply are choosing cable or other providers.
There's one other important data point. Business lines in service have grown slightly over that same time period. Paradoxically, cord cutting has increased at the same time that fixed voice lines have held about level.
All of that is hard to square with estimates that 13 to 16 percent of U.S. homes already are wireless-only. The logical inference is that higher numbers of households headed by younger people are wireless only, at the same time that business use of fixed voice is up a bit and consumer use is down a bit.
An impressionistic example: as my four children headed off to college, my own household dropped one landline and added one mobile account, but now there are four more wireless-only "households" out there.
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