More likely than not

The United States has passed a milestone in telecommunications history: Cell-phone-only households now outnumber landline-only households, according to (pdf) Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI), which released the findings in its "The Birth of a Cellular Nation" whitepaper, reports MarketingCharts.

MRI conducts approximately 26,000 in-home, in-person interviews yearly with US adults, collecting data in two "waves" of interviews with 13,000 respondents.

The landline-only population has been larger than the cell-only population since MRI first began measuring cell phone use in 2000, and as of March-October 2006 the cell-only households constituted 12.4 percent of the population, compared with 14.5 percent of landline-only.

In the most current wave (fielded from September 2006 to April 2007), those positions were reversed, with the cell-only segment rising to 14.0 percent and the landline-only population dropping to 12.3 percent:

"This milestone is a consequence of two trends - a steepening decline since 2000 in the percentage of households with any landline, accompanied by a rapid rise in the number of households with at least one cell phone," said Andrew Arthur, VP of MRI's Market Solutions division and the author of the whitepaper.

Some 84.5 percent of people now have now have landlines in their households, while 86.2 percent now have at least one cell phone, according to MRI data:

Young consumers, particularly those who live on their own, dominate the burgeoning cell-only population.

"Logic would suggest that single-person households have less need for a landline. And, of course, fewer income-earners to pay for one," said Arthur. "The economic and practical realities faced by people living alone tend to force a choice between the two technologies and the numbers are particularly striking at the young end of the spectrum."

Nearly six of ten 18-24 year-olds - 57.1 percent - who live in single-person households are now cell-only; that's four times more likely than the adult average to be cell-only:

The whitepaper is available via MRI.