2024-07-07 09:27:33
“I’ll call the landline” – sentences like this used to be common because expensive calls to a cell phone were to be avoided. That was a long time ago.
The landline telephone continues to lose importance. According to a survey by the comparison portal Verivox, only 16.1 percent of users of fixed telephone connections at home pick up the phone every day. That was 2.6 percentage points less than in the same survey a year ago.
Other respondents did not make calls every day, but at least several times a week or they picked up the phone several times a month. 30 percent of the 1,030 respondents said that they no longer use a landline phone at all. According to the survey, the landline remains important primarily for older people.
The loss of importance is also reflected in the fact that one in five respondents who has a landline connection could not even remember its telephone number. The development shown in the survey is consistent with a survey by the Federal Network Agency, according to which 20 percent fewer minutes of conversation were made from landline telephones in Germany last year than in 2022.
“Landline telephony is declining because more and more people are making calls at home using their cell phones,” says Marc Albers, head of private customers at Vodafone Germany, about the development. This is because voice telephony is increasingly included in mobile phone tariffs at no extra cost and mobile phone signals are reaching into homes more and more easily thanks to the advanced mobile network expansion. “And finally, we are also making calls more often using data services such as WhatsApp and the like because landline internet is getting better and better,” says Albers.