The end of the world as we knew it?

A recent article in Economist noted that more households in the U.S. now have only a mobile phone than only a landline phone. This made me wonder, have we come to the end of landline phones as we knew them? If we haven’t reached the end, can we at least see the end from here?

It isn’t just in the U.S. Deutsche Telekom reported a 7.4 percent decline in PSTN lines in the second quarter, a loss of almost a half-million lines. Last year NTT lost more than 3 million lines. This decline has been going on for years in developed markets. But wait, there’s more. Even China Telecom, Russia’s Svyazinvest and most other traditional operators in developing countries reported declining PSTN lines last year...