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The state where people most rely on their cellphones isn’t, as you might think, a busy metropolis (like New York) or a city crowded with texting college students (like Boston). It’s scenic, sparsely populated Idaho, where as of last year more than half (52.3%) of adults lived in households that had cut the landline-phone cord completely.
That’s according to a recent report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, which has tracked the rise of wireless-only households since 2003. Close behind Idaho were Mississippi, where 49.4% of adults lived in wireless-only households, and Arkansas (49% of adults). Washington, D.C. came in fifth at 46%, just behind Utah, but New York was clustered near the bottom with several other Northeastern states, with 23.5% of adults in wireless-only households. Where you’re most likely to find a landline: New Jersey, where 78.9% of households have one (regardless of how much they use it).
The patterns are similar when the analysis is expanded to include households that have a landline phone but receive most calls on cellphones. Largely rural states in the West and South have the highest shares of such “wireless-primary” households, while the lowest wireless-primary shares are clustered in the Northeast.
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Overall, according to a separate CDC report, two in every five American homes (39.4%) had only wireless phones as of the first half of 2013. About 38% of U.S. adults (or 90 million) and 45.4% of U.S. children (33 million) lived in wireless-only households. The wireless-only share has been rising steadily ever since the CDC began asking people about their phone status: Just three years ago only 26.6% of U.S. households were wireless-only.
The wireless-only lifestyle is especially predominant among the poor and the young. According to the CDC, nearly two-thirds (65.6%) of adults ages 25-29 lived in households with only wireless phones, as did three-in-five (59.9%) 30- to 34-year-olds and a majority (54.3%) of adults ages 18-24. A majority of adults living in poverty (54.7%) lived in a wireless-only household, versus 47.5% of what the CDC calls the “near-poor” and 35.3% of non-poor adults; wireless-only households also predominate among Hispanics, renters and adults living with roommates. (Some of those categories overlap, of course.)
Young adults who grew up with cellphones may never have had a landline to give up, industry analysts say, while poor people may cut the cord on a seldom-used landline phone to save money. (As Bloomberg News notes, federal subsidies encourage low-cost and no-contract providers to give phones to low-income people.) As fewer people use traditional landlines, phone companies have become more reluctant to maintain their traditional switched networks; the resulting degradation of call quality, in turn, can lead even more people to switch.
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The CDC data are paralleled by Pew Research Center findings on people who use their phones to go online. A 2013 survey found, for example, that overall 34% of those “cell internet users” go online mostly using their phones, but the “cell-mostly” share rises to 45% among the lowest-income people, 50% among people ages 18 to 29, and 60% among Hispanics.
The demographic and geographic differences between wireless-only and landline households pose a particular statistical challenge for survey researchers, who have to make sure that their samples of both groups are adequately represented and properly weighted in their analyses.