Five States Where People Don’t Have Home Phones

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center:

The state where people most rely on their cellphones is not, as you might think, a busy metropolis (like New York) or a city crowded with texting college students (like Boston).

First among the states in which people have severed their home phones is Idaho, where 52.3% of people are “wireless only.”

Mississippi is second, with 49.4% of adults living in wireless-only households, according to Pew. Third is Arkansas at 49%. Pew reports that “Washington, D.C. came in fifth at 46%, just behind Utah.”

At the far end of the spectrum is “New Jersey, where 78.9% of households have one (landline).”

Pew offers other statistics about wireless-only households, but they do little to explain the state-by-state numbers. Based on demographic measurement:

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.

But Idaho does not have a substantially higher percentage of young adults than New Jersey does, so demographic and geographic data, take together, do not tell much of a story.

What the data do say is that the landline business is a crumbling one, which large phone companies need to support, even if the support is financially draining.