Wireless ISP Relish Predicts UK Landlines to be “Virtually Extinct” by 2025

A recently published White Paper by the 4G fixed wireless broadband ISP Relish (UK Broadband Ltd.), which offers speeds of up to 50Mbps across parts of central London, has rather shakily predicted that fixed landlines will be “non-existent” in the office and will be “virtually extinct” in the home come 2025.

The ISP appears to base its conclusion on a mix of recent data from Ofcom and a separate study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The latter of which claims that landline usage in the UK has fallen in recent years (e.g. a 33% decline in voice calls made from households’ landlines over the past 5 years).

Furthermore it notes that the number of business landlines has slightly declined by 12% as some businesses switch to alternative voice services, such as VoIP and mobile. Certainly the drop in voice calls over fixed phone lines is nothing new, although Ofcom’s most recent data suggests that actual fixed line uptake hasn’t shifted by much (most of us still need it for broadband) and indeed the only real decline has been in terms of business connectivity (here).

On top of that Relish notes how the cost of home broadband has fallen over the past few years, yet this has often been mitigated by the ever rising RETAIL cost of phone line rental. This allows ISPs to promote cheaper broadband prices, while sneaking the price rises into line rental where the actual underlying WHOLESALE cost has otherwise remained fairly static.

Relish’s White Paper Statement

The landline will be non-existent in the office of 2025 and will be virtually extinct in the home. The workplace of the future will not take the form of an outdated central location, but workers will have the flexibility to work from home, or wherever there is a broadband connection.

Since the introduction of mobile technology, businesses and homeowners have increasingly harnessed the opportunity to become more agile and flexible, and cut back on unnecessary costs. As a result, the need for landline telephones has dramatically declined.

Naturally this is all part of Relish’s marketing, which has repeatedly attacked the cost of phone line rental (example) in order to promote its own broadband service (Relish’s wireless service does not require customers to pay for a landline service). But a quick skim through Relish’s paper left us none the wiser as to how they reached the conclusion that 2025 would mark the virtual end of landlines. Relish’s paper confusingly seems to conflate landline and voice calls without making the distinction between both sides of the service, with the paper tending to just say “landline“.

In fact the only other reference we can find for the 2025 date in the whole paper comes in the form of a very hypothetical comment from Tushar Agarwal, Co-Founder of Hubble (not the telescope), who states: “Mobile phones won’t exist by 2025. As seen in the Spike Jonze film ‘Her’, they’ll be replaced by small wearable devices. Consumer tech, such as smartwatches, will become commonplace in the work space. Everything is heading to the cloud.”

Certainly it is true that Mobile Broadband connectivity has improved a lot over the past few years, particularly with the semi-recent advent of 4G connectivity, although it only really makes sense to go mobile-only for, A) homes in remote areas where fixed line broadband can be are very slow and b) homes with light data usage that aren’t prolific Internet users.

Otherwise mobile data is often more expensive and most operators impose usage caps on Mobile Broadband that, even with the most expensive option, can come in at well below the current fixed line broadband average (Ofcom currently pegs this at 58 GigaBytes per month). Meanwhile fixed wireless broadband ISPs like Relish, which are able to be more competitive with fixed line usage, lack the coverage to make a truly national dent.

Lest we not forget that BT are currently planning to make broadband speeds of ‘up to’ 500Mbps available to “most homes” over the next ten years and Virgin Media are also expanding their soon-to-be 300Mbps capable DOCSIS cable network to 60% of the UK by 2020. In other words, it will take a dramatic shift in the market to make landlines themselves “virtually extinct” by 2025, although we can see calls made over fixed phone lines going in that direction.