There are many of us who may not even have a landline at home. In particular, the younger generation, who are always connected and intertwined with each other through social networking sites, mobile phone apps, and text messages. Now that mobile phone rates are perhaps cheaper than ever and almost everyone owns a personal mobile phone, land lines may be seen as superfluous, and with good reason. But have we lost something special along with the landline?
We now live in a generation where things can look more connected, as I described in the previous paragraph, but the truth is that today’s generation is so fast-paced that people rarely have time to talk. Office colleagues email each other when sitting in a separate room, families interact on social media sites, kids text their parents. However, more contact is good, right? It really has more to do with the quality of the contact than the frequency. Much more can be conveyed in a personal phone call, and they are possibly much more effective methods of communication than a short email or text message.
Fortunately, landlines haven’t gone the way of the dinosaurs. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite. Landlines are flourishing, particularly in business, and the preferred method of contact for business meetings and brainstorming is yet the good old landline phone. You’d be hard-pressed to find a business office that didn’t have a landline phone on every desk to communicate with customers, use the internal intercom, and connect to conference calls. We see fewer landlines because ordinary people have less and less use of them. Very often they are installed in a house and rarely used because people prefer their mobile phones and their multifunctionality and ease of use.
Another advantage for landlines is the infrastructure. There are many rural parts of the UK where simple mobile phones would not receive any coverage and texting, emailing and phone calls would be next to impossible. The landline telephone network has been established for decades and it is possible to receive a clear phone call over a landline in the most remote places. Security is another big advantage of using landlines. If an emergency call came through a landline, it would be quite possible to determine where that phone call was coming from and send help immediately. This is something that is not always possible with a mobile phone.
So while landlines may seem dead, the truth is that they are alive and well, thriving in rural areas and in businesses across the country.