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Why the CDC Tracks Wireless-Only Households and Their Risky Behavior
- kawera 11y agoDupe detector? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684054
- ck2 11y agoThe mind blowing fact is people still pay for long distance calls on landlines and it's not cheap. Free internet calls have not only existed for years but you can even get free cell service these days with services like ringplus. So landlines are the new AOL users (and probably a huge intersection at that).
- jhauris 11y agoLand line user here. Don't get cell service at my house, the WISP we use for internet is usually fine but occasionally unreliable. Also, a couple years ago we lost power for almost a week. So I think there is still a good reason for some people to keep a land line for backup/emergency purposes.
- eli 11y agoAgree completely, though that's different than using it for routine long distance calls
- donatj 11y agoMy parents still have a landline for largely the same reason. Cell phone only works in certain spots in the house and their DSL requires a land line / isn't reliable enough for VoIP anyway. One second they'll be buzzing along the next will be an hour of 56k-esq speeds.
- pixl97 11y agoThat's an interesting, yet opposite, correlation from the article. http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/15/8965409/us-internet-access-map-white-house-report-broadband-inequality http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/15/8965409/us-internet-access... Of course it could mean that people living in broadband poor regions with poor cell service are the new 'unreachables'. They don't have reliable land lines, and their cell service is spotty. This in itself is a worrying theory as people with times of service unavailability are much more likely to remain in poverty, many types of jobs poorer people work have on demand scheduling where their hours are changed commonly. Being unreachable they may quickly find themselves fired.
- manyxcxi 11y agoWe had a land line for a while as it actually LOWERED our overall bill with Comcast, but we only ever had the fax machine plugged into it or used it to call our missing cell phones. The problem I see about the emergency backup situation is that if we lost power for more than a few hours, our phone wouldn't work either because the battery backup would eventually die in the modem. The same was true of our old FiOS install at the last place (though the battery was much larger and not in the modem, at the fiber junction). So if you don't have an old copper phone line that doesn't need power from your house, what's the point of even having a landline 'in case of emergency'?
- DHJSH 11y agoWe keep a land-line for emergency use (9-1-1, etc) and has a tertiary backup for our alarm system with uses cable modem and cell network to talk to central station. If those fail, it will try the POTS line dialer. anyway... Does Mr. Stephen Blumberg, pictured here http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/12/03/stephen_blumberg_cdc_vert-6776f27f339bf47c4eee2a58950d17e2ea026971-s1400.jpg http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/12/03/stephen_blumberg_... know about this page on his own organization's website? http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html
- euroclydon 11y agoThis was a a pretty lame article. Correlating binge drinking with lack of landlines -- what? How about the correlation between longer 911 response times with lack of landlines? Now that would be interesting.
- marcusgarvey 11y agoThe rise of cellphone-only households why I'm skeptical of presidential polling. Don't most of these polls rely on those with landlines?
- leetrout 11y agoI've never been called by Gallup, for instance, but I do receive calls for national campaign efforts on my cell.
- apawloski 11y agoI've had Quinnipiac call me on my cell phone. Assuming the polling uses random-digit dialing, it shouldn't matter if it's a landline or cell phone, right?
- logn 11y agoI am also skeptical because the people answering polls are people who answer robocalls/spam/surveys.
- Fomite 11y agoYou can account for this using survey weighting.
- stanmancan 11y agoWe use our cell phones for all actual calls, but about 6 months ago decided to get a copper telephone line to the house in case of emergencies. I don't even recall what our landlines number is. Nice to know we can still place a call if the power goes out.
- jonknee 11y ago> Nice to know we can still place a call if the power goes out. You can still use your cell phone if the power goes out and it's often more reliable (fallen trees often take out phone service with the power, but not cell phone towers).
- tjohns 11y agoWith one caveat: Cell towers aren't mandated to stay up in an extended power outage, unlike landlines. They have battery backups, but once those fail, it's a question of whether the phone company can hook up a generator in time. (Some towers in large metros have permanent generators, but not all.)
- heartbreak 11y agoNot just large metros, either. I live in a < 100,000 city and have seen the failover generators outside of the building at the base of several towers. I'd imagine they're not on every tower or even any tower in rural areas given the added expense.
- morganvachon 11y agoIn general, you don't have to have a subscription to a landline service to have 911 access on POTS. Federal law requires the phone companies to provide access to 911 dialed from a landline phone whether there is current service or not, and they have to ensure the line from the pole to the house/apartment is live to facilitate this (it is still the homeowner's responsibility to deal with the in-house wiring, of course). That said, if you live in one of the increasing number of states trying to circumvent these federal requirements, you may indeed have to keep paying just to have emergency access, or you may end up being forced out of landline access altogether: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-rules-frustrate-telecoms/2012/04/12/gIQAG2XvDT_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-rul...
- xigency 11y agoIt's interesting that the article doesn't address this, but the reason I think that relying only on cellphones without a landline is risky has to do with emergency situations, and for some reason I thought the CDC would tie into that, but maybe I've just been watching too much of the walking dead. In the case of a cellphone-only household, it's really easy to think of a time when all of the cellphone holders are not present, so that there's no real contact into or out of the house, potentially with people present. In the case of a 911 situation like someone choking or having a heart attack (or a fire) that could come down to going up and down the street knocking on a neighbor's door, or jumping in a sedan to race to the hospital. I also wonder how accurate geo-location would be for 911 calls, where it's very easy (I would hope) for 911 operators to know the exact street address of someone making an emergency call, even if they ask for the address as well.
- morgante 11y agoThat used to be a problem, but by now cell phones are just as useful in emergency scenarios. The CDC isn't saying that only having a cell phone is itself risky. They're saying it correlates with risky behavior.
- nsxwolf 11y agoI called 911 from my cell phone for a carbon monoxide detector incident and they had no idea where I was. I was transferred around multiple times and gave my address more than once. It took multiple minutes to get the call completed and it was probably at least 10 minutes before the fire department arrived. Contrast that with my childhood neigbor pranking 911 from my home phone in the early 80s. The police knew where the call came from and showed up promptly.
- ssully 11y agoSimilar situation. Came home to my house broken into, backdoor was completely smashed in, luckily the robbers were gone. When I called 911 from my cell I got an operator from a neighboring town; my house is on the border of a major US city and some small neighboring towns. While they were trying to transfer me I just went inside and used my landline and got connected before they finished transferring.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoHere I thought I was going to find CDC secretly studying the effects of cell phone exposure on people's health and behavior. Would've been fun and controversial. Gotta be something boring I guess.
- backtoyoujim 11y agoAs of 2013 only 17.8% US adults smoked. What is this article on about?
- nissehulth 11y ago17% of americans read a newspaper every day. Now if only we knew if they all smoke and if they have a landline.
- legulere 11y agoI wonder how the number of people with only with mobile Internet is developing. It's definitely doable with LTE today. However the problem are traffic intensive things: Videos, Updates, Audio
- mschuster91 11y agoGo to Finland. 17€ for over 150GB and counting LTE. A friend of mine is studying there and I thought she was joking me - I get 3GB 3G traffic and a call flat for 25€ in Germany.
- kstenerud 11y agoI'm actually surprised at how many people still have landlines. I switched over to wireless in 1998 and never looked back.
- jessaustin 11y agoIt used to be the case that a landline was required to get DSL. I don't know if it still is, but that would be a reasonable explanation.
- Bill_Dimm 11y agoDSL is available without telephone service, at least with Verizon in Pennsylvania. It is called "dry loop DSL." 3 Mbps / 768 kbps is costing me more than the price they are advertising for 50 Mbps / 50 Mbps FiOS (which I can't get) without contract. So it exists but it sucks, and I'm not sure you actually save much (or anything) by getting DSL without telephone service.
- Falkon1313 11y agoI wonder how many just have it because it comes with their cable/satellite TV bundle? Satellite companies used to really push that as required (and charged an extra fee if you didn't have it) because their boxes used it to phone home.
- pkaye 11y agoHow come the graph accounts for only 97% of the people?
- darshan 11y agoThe obvious answer is phonelessness. Sure enough, that's what the paper linked to in the article says: 3.4% of households surveyed did not have a phone. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201512.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20151...
- nissehulth 11y agohttp://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations does have some interesting correlations too. For example, http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28580 http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28580
- thaumasiotes 11y agoThe site has plenty of good ones, but that one's not interesting at all. The correlation between any two data series consisting of two points each is ±1 by definition.
- mhb 11y agoI'm pretty surprised that the better quality of the actual sound of a call on a landline is seldom (at least here) given as a reason for keeping/preferring a landline.
- pki 11y agoI've always had mobile sound a lot better. This might vary by location or provider?
- ams6110 11y agoFor me, landline (POTS) is better than cell. However VoIP on either wifi or wired network is generally much better than either.
- mhb 11y ago3 reasons voice quality on smart phones still sucks - It's a miracle you can hear anything at all http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/05/3-reasons-voice-quality-on-smart-phones-still-sucks/index.htm http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/05/3-reasons-vo...
- mcv 11y agoI don't smoke and rarely drink, but we're also considering dropping our landline. Mainly because we rarely use it, few people ever call us on it, the phone itself is crap, and we don't care enough to replace it with a properly working phone. A friend has dropped his landline ages ago, but he does enjoy drinking a good whisky, and he even smokes occasionally.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zw123456 11y agoFor those interested in digging into the facts and data, this FCC document is actually pretty good and no white wash in my view: https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet65/oet65b.pdfhttps://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet65/oet65b.pdf https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Do... I hope that link works but you can google the title "Evaluating Compliance with FCC Guidelines for Human Exposure to Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields" and it comes right up. There are some interesting tables and graphs for the TL;DR Figure 1 on page 30, shows the relationship between distance and ERP to the power density. Then Table 1, Page 72. Most cell phones operate in the .6 - 2.5 Ghz range and the power is ~ 100mw range. Cell towers operate at about 40 - 60 W ERP, the distance depends on where you are.
- mirimir 11y agoContrary to my paranoid reading of the title, I get from the article that the CDC does not individually track wireless-only households. They are apparently just looking at aggregate statistics. However, I do wonder whether they retain any individualized data.
- ghostly_s 11y agoIt's not just you. It's a pretty click-baity, low-information title.
- rapala 11y agoThe percentage of households with a landline was quite shocking. Based on quick googling the percentage here in Finland is ~11%. Gives perspective to the pricing of internet services in the USA vs Europe.
- scott_karana 11y agoMultiple reasons. (And they pretty much boil down to: "why put hundreds/thousands of expensive cell towers in the sparsely populated cornfields and plains that cover the country")\ 1) The USA is geographically massive. Infrastructure between isolated "neighbouring" cities can be hundreds of kilometers. Cell towers, needless to say, are more expensive when attempting to cover a larger geographical area. 2) The population density varies dramatically 3) There are many rural pockets of thinly-distributed populaces, which can make the ROI lower in aforementioned large coverage areas 4) There are many mountainous, isolated communities, whose topography negatively affects coverage 5) Unlike Finland, where coastal/southern communities contain the vast majority of the populace, and nobody living up north,[1] the US Midwest contains a large populace, thinly spread over an enormous area... [2] Copper landlines are reliable and simple to fix. Cellphone towers are expensive, have a limited range, are highly affected by topography, and thus only make sense in areas above a certain threshold of population densities. And even still, living in a neighbouring community of a metropolitan area, you may be out of range of the metro's cell towers, and the ROI for your smaller community may not justify the expense! 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland#/media/File:Population_map_of_Finland.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland#/media... 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_states_showing_population_density_in_2013.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_states_showing_pop... Size comparison: http://overlapmaps.com/index.php http://overlapmaps.com/index.php, or http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/US/FI http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/US/FI
- 0898 11y agoAm I the only one who parses CDC as Cult of the Dead Cow?
- ghostly_s 11y agoI have a hard time seeing how they can control for age in their analysis of this trait, as I'm not aware of a single person under 30 who has a landline, or any intention of ever acquiring one.
- wdr1 11y agoMy wife & I were wireless-only until we had our first child. It turns out 911 is handled very differently (at least in California). If I were to call 911 from my landline I'm connected to our local dispatch & my address is automatically sent. If I were to call from our cell phones, only the cell tower is sent (and maybe that), and the call is routed through a statewide system. I hope to never have to actually call, but figured it's worth the small fee if seconds matter. That said, it still seems backwards. My cell phone has GPS coordinates. I would hope that someone in the not-too-distant-future we can make calling 911 as good (if not better) on a cell phone.
- viraptor 11y agoGPS will only be helpful on flat terrain. If you live on the 25th floor, your location may be ~a block away from where you really are. Subscription address will be again more useful.