When I pick up my iPhone to talk to my parents a few times each month, I call the house phone. It’s the first number I ever learned by heart — I dialed it crying that time I wanted to come home in the middle of a sleepover as a young girl, after I was in a car accident as a teen, when I needed a ride home after drinking at a party as a young adult, right after I got engaged in my early 20s, and dozens of times in between.
My parents still live in the house I grew up in, along a country road in Massachusetts. Because of their property’s rural location, my parents didn’t have broadband internet at home until 2017 or enough cell service to make calls until just last year.
When I lived there as a teenager, this lack of access to the world was frustrating. I remember having to get my online homework done in cafes and holding my slider cell phone up to the top of my bedroom window to get enough bars to send a text message. Now, as an adult who lives in a fully connected apartment in a small city nearly 2,000 miles away from my childhood home, I look back on those days fondly.
That nostalgia is amplified by the fact that I soon may not be able to “call home” anymore. Not only has my parents’ landline steadily increased in price over the last two years (up to $113 a month from $70 in 2022), but it’s also started having technical issues. The phone company, it seems, could be pushing my parents toward a landline-free existence.
My parents aren’t the only ones getting rid of their home phone — figures from The Washington Post put the number of Americans who still use a landline at just 27 percent of the population, a sharp plummet from the 80 percent of people who had landlines 10 years ago. Earlier this year, AT&T submitted a request to stop servicing landlines in the state of California, and similar processes are underway in other locations, even in places outside of the U.S. like France and the U.K.
The irony of the situation is that landlines are still the most reliable form of getting in touch. Just days after AT&T’s request in California, there was a local cell network outage and officials instructed consumers to use their landlines to call 911 in an emergency.
Thomas Steed, chairman of the Association of BellTel Retirees (which advocates for benefits for former employees of the original Bell System of telecommunication companies), put it this way: “Landlines are a matter of national security.”
Because phone companies have their own generators, “when everything else crashes, we’re still up and running.” Steed says this is an “actual lifeline,” especially for senior citizens, many of whom haven’t adopted the latest technology — only 76 percent of adults age 65 and older have cell phones, a Statista report released last year shows.
Steed got his start in the industry as a cable splicer for the American Bell Telephone Company in 1971, then worked as a lineman installing and maintaining telephone cables paid for by taxpayer dollars. “It’s heart-wrecking for me,” he says about what looks like the beginning of the end for the infrastructure he spent his career building.
More than just a reliable way to place calls, landlines are also a mindful way of staying in touch. With a landline, you have to be intentional about reaching out to your loved ones; there’s no fielding text messages or exchanging memes on Facebook at any time of day or night. You can’t use a landline at a stoplight or walk around with it in your pocket all day.
“There are both positive and negative impacts of switching to cell phones on mental health,” says Holly Schiff, a clinical psychologist based in New England. “Of course with cell phones, we have more connectivity and accessibility, which can be helpful when it comes to staying socially connected and not feeling lonely or isolated.” On the flipside, though, is the “increased stress and anxiety because of constant connectivity.” According to Schiff, having a landline makes it easier to “unplug,” avoiding the stress caused by constant notifications.
As I look ahead to the not-so-distant day when my home phone number is reassigned, this all makes sense — and it feels like nostalgia isn’t the only thing at stake. Are we prepared to lose more than that?
