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Anyone who grew up before Y2K remembers what it was like to make a phone call on a landline: You’d punch in your friend’s phone number (which you had memorized), make awkward small talk with their mom or dad until your friend got on the line, and then see how far you could stretch that curly cord to get some actual privacy while you chatted. While landlines never really went away, it’s been many years since their heyday. Most Americans — 76% of adults and 86.8% of children — live in wireless-only households, according to a 2023 report from the...

Brace yourself for wave upon wave of … political polls. The latest show President Trump lagging presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, as usual. But stop. Let us do what no one does – look BEHIND these polls, understand the process and bias in polling. Take two recent polls, by NPR/PBS/Marist (NPR) and ABC/Washington Post (ABC). Both report new anti-Trump findings. Take a moment and unpack them. MSN.com – like may non-technical, left-leaning sites – summarizes both. A stinging line punctuates a leading paragraph. Says MSN, NPR’s poll “has Biden beating Trump 60 percent to 35 percent among suburban voters.”...

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Sitting here in my den, I have two ways that I can call you and two ways that I can get a call from you. One of them has been around since the late 1800s and still does pretty much what it did when it was invented. The other is virtually magic in a box — and that box isn't much bigger than a deck of cards. One sits like a weird dusty antique on my desk. It's not pretty. No talented designer has ever bothered to make it museum-worthy. When it rings, I hear the same sound, no matter...

The concept of a home phone may soon be going the way of the corner pay phone. Government research shows that more and more households are getting rid of their land line. And for the first time, cell-phone-only homes outnumber those with just land lines. Kelly Fitzsimmons did not give up her phone without a fight. The instrument of gossip and grand plans, and the bearer of bad news and good, the land line to her was a lifeline. "I just had in my head you gotta have a land line. You gotta have a land line," she says. "That's...

(04-09) 16:37 PDT SAN JOSE -- Vandals cut fiber-optic cable lines belonging to AT&T at two locations early today, knocking out phones and access to 911 emergency services to thousands of residential customers and businesses in southern Santa Clara County, in Santa Cruz and San Benito counties and along the Peninsula, authorities said. Four AT&T fiber-optic cables in an underground vault were severed shortly before 1:30 a.m. along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in south San Jose, police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said. Four more underground cables, at least two of which belong to AT&T, were cut about two...

Nearly one-fifth of all U-S homes (18%) have cut the land line connection and use only a cell phone for their communication. That is a big increase from the seven percent using only a cell phone in 2005. How about you - Do you plan to dump the land line? And when? No - I'll stay with Alexander Graham Bell's wired version. Yes - Within the next six months. Yes - Within the next year. Yes - But I'm not sure when. Select your option and vote

By the end of President Obama's first term, there won't be any more copper landlines left in the country. One of the challenges facing the Federal Communications Commission and the new administration is how to deal with the fallout from the end of this venerable technology. It's gonna get ugly for some people – people who can't afford to do without communication – unless we're proactive about this problem. Here's what's happening, as you probably know. Young people don't bother with landlines (unless they live beyond cell coverage); they just use their mobile phones or Skype for voice communication. The...

Cellular subscribers are paying hundreds of millions of dollars each year to subsidize land-line telephone service, enriching big telecommunications companies while providing little or no benefit to cell-phone users. The subsidies are intended to reimburse the companies for providing traditional phone service in rough terrain and rural areas where stringing lines can be costly. But rampant development has transformed some of these backwaters into booming subdivisions, with no real adjustment to the distribution formula; others, such as the oceanfront celebrity playground of Malibu, are receiving subsidies simply because of their difficult topography. Outdated formulas for tabulating the surcharges -- coupled...