26 Percent of UK People Never Use their Landline for Phone Calls

A new Opinium survey of 2,001 UK adults, which was conducted in mid-March 2021 and commissioned by Uswitch, has revealed that 26% of people with a landline don’t even have a phone attached to it and 35% of respondents said they only have a landline because it’s needed for their broadband connection.

By now it’s a well-known fact that traditional landline phone services are in terminal decline, at least they are for the residential market. Today most of us own a Mobile phone and probably make way more use of it than our dusty home phones, many of which are connected via a copper line over the traditional phone (PSTN / POTS) network. This is hardly a surprise, given the higher cost of call packages via traditional home phones.

On top of that a lot of people also complement this with Voice-over-IP (VoIP) services (Skype, Vonage etc.) and free internet messaging solutions (Email, Facebook, WhatsApp etc.), all of which are changing how we communicate. The number of homes with a landline has thus fallen by c.4 million (down 15%) since the year 2000 to about 22 million connections now.

Broadband ISPs are aware of this too, which is partly why it’s often now possible to buy a data-only connection on both copper (ADSL, FTTC) and fibre optic (FTTP) lines, not that removing the phone (voice) service from a copper line will help the price of your package much (most of the cost is in the rental of the physical line, rather than the voice side of things). The new survey helps to give such changes some context.

Summary of Survey Results

➤ On average, households spend just 5 minutes a day (35 minutes a week) talking on their landlines, down 27% from two years ago. But older consumers make 46 minutes of calls a week on their landlines, compared to 25 minutes for young people. Likewise, 95% of people aged over-65s have a landline, but this falls to 82% for those aged 35 to 54, and ownership drops to just 52% among 18-24 year olds.

➤ 29% say the last landline call they received was suspicious or an unsolicited marketing call, which compares with 17% on mobile phones. The number of nuisance calls reported has not changed dramatically in recent years, but the proportion of scam calls has risen to now make up more than 26% of unwanted contacts (up from 4% in 2017).

➤ 22% say they avoid answering their landline phone in case it is a nuisance call, and 28% have had a bad experience with scam and sales callers

➤ 83% of rural households have a landline, compared to 65% in urban areas, which is partly because it remains a lifeline for residents in rural areas where mobile reception can often be poor.

➤ Landline use has even fallen during lockdown, with 27% of households using their connection less, compared to only 15% using it more frequently.

➤ 35% of households have registered for the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) to dodge nuisance calls, which in our experience seems to have little impact on the problem. By comparison the most popular solution to such issues among 18 to 34-year-olds is simply to stop answering the landline altogether.

➤ 59% of households that have both a landline and a mobile phone say making a call on a mobile is cheaper. However, 37% of landline users don’t actually know how much their calls cost, and 18% of people can’t even remember the last time they used their landline for a call.

The decline in landline use should at least make it easier for homes to handle the pending removal of traditional phone services, which is due to complete on Openreach’s (BT) UK network by the end of December 2025. In their place operator’s will be providing digital (VoIP) style solutions, which most people will be able to take as an optional extra alongside broadband (in the past, broadband was the optional extra).

We should add that a special low bandwidth service will also exist from some ISPs for phone-only customers. For the most part this will just mean plugging your existing handset (analogue or DECT) into the back of a router instead of a wall socket.

The likelihood of all this is that, after 2025, many households may simply choose not to bother having a home phone service at all, instead placing greater reliance on mobile calls, VoIP services and internet messaging solutions (these don’t need to remain fixed to a specific location, like traditional phone services do).