The majority of Americans — 50.8 percent — now rely solely on wireless telephones. That watershed cord-cutting moment was reached in the last half of 2016, according to the federal government.
In Arkansas, the tipping point arrived even sooner. In 2013, the government estimated that 53.9 percent of households in the state were wireless-only. By 2015, the latest figures available, 59.8 percent of Arkansas households had no landlines and relied only on wireless phones. Only Idaho among the 50 states had a higher rate: 61.6 percent.
However, only 4.8 percent of households in Arkansas were landline only as of 2015; that tied the state with Missouri, while 12 other states reported having a lower percentage of landline-only households.
The figures come from the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. (The National Center for Health Statistics includes Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, phones as landlines.)
The Federal Communications Commission reports that Arkansas had 560,000 landlines — not including VoIP — in June 2016, compared with 618,000 in June 2015, a 9 percent decline in just one year.
“Consumers have been switching away from traditional phone services to wireless or broadband Voice over IP (VoIP) for years,” said a spokesman for USTelecom, a telecommunications trade association based in Washington, D.C. “That’s why telecommunications companies have increasingly been focusing on upgrading their infrastructure to provide broadband service and retire old, copper-line phone networks.”
Judy White, a retired Little Rock schoolteacher, is among the many Arkansans who have eliminated their landlines to go cellphone-only.
“The reason we gave up our landline was, mainly, we would come in from work and our [phone] message box would be totally full” with voicemails from marketers and other unwanted messages, she said, despite having listed the number on the National Do Not Call Registry. “And at the time I had parents who lived three hours away who are elderly, and I thought that I had to go through every single message. I couldn’t just erase them all and ignore it.”
Secondly, “once we got iPhones, it just didn’t seem that necessary,” White said.
The steady decline in landlines is reflected in the reports filed with the state Public Service Commission by telecommunications carriers doing business in Arkansas.
For a number of years, Arkansas Business published an annual list of the largest local exchange carriers doing business in Arkansas. The rankings were based on revenue generated in the state as reported to the PSC. The list was discontinued after 2013 because the PSC only tracks regulated local exchange carriers and interexchange carriers — the providers of traditional landline phones and long-distance service — and such service no longer reflects the reality of the telecom industry, where wireless service holds sway.
As Arkansas Business noted in May, AT&T Arkansas (also known as Southwestern Bell Telephone Co.) and AT&T Corp., which combined are the biggest providers in the state, saw the number of their lines decline 48 percent between the end of 2012 and the end of 2016, from 422,802 to 221,740.
Its Arkansas-assessable revenue fell by a third during the same period, from $300.7 million to $200.2 million.
CenturyLink — which in 2013 ranked No. 2 based on Arkansas-assessable revenue of $77.3 million — experienced a landline decline of 20 percent between 2012 and 2016, from 148,946 total lines to 118,573.
Despite the decrease in landlines, the company has managed to maintain its Arkansas revenue. CenturyLink reported $77.7 million in revenue generated in the state in 2016.
Rene DeLaricheliere, a market development manager for CenturyLink, based in Monroe, Louisiana, said that the company has sustained revenue by opening up previously unserved rural markets and upgrading its network.
“We see most customers increasing their demand,” DeLaricheliere said, “because the demand for bandwidth is just off the charts. You just can’t keep up with it, whether it’s education, business or personal use.”
In addition, CenturyLink has developed its business market, including cloud and managed services. “Arkansas is a great market,” he said.
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