Telecom Trends

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States has released information on wireless substitution, based on early data from its most recent National Health Interview Survey.

What is interesting?

Let's start with the source of the study - a national health study that generates the data from in-person interviews. From June through December 2006, household telephone status information was obtained for 13,056 households in the United States.

Why is CDC concerned about wireless substitution? Because most major survey research organizations, including the National Center for Health Statistics, do not include wireless telephone numbers when conducting telephone surveys.

Let's look at some of the numbers.

• more than one in eight American homes (12.8%) only had wireless telephones during the second half of 2006;
• 11.6% of all children—8.5 million children—lived in wireless-only households;
• approximately 2.2% of households had neither wireless nor landline service.

It gets especially interesting when you look at demographics within the wireless-only households:

• more than half of all adults (54.0%) living with unrelated roommates, lived in households with only wireless telephones;
• half of all wireless-only adults were less than 30 years of age; a quarter of adults aged 18-24 years were in wireless-only households; nearly 30% of adults aged 25-29 years lived in households with only wireless telephones.
  
• adults living in poverty were nearly twice as likely (22.4%) as the national average to be living in households with only wireless telephones; non-Hispanic white adults (10.8%) were less likely than Hispanic adults (15.3%) to be wireless-only; adults living in the South (14.0%) were more likely than those in the Northeast (8.6%) to be part of wireless-only households.
  

The inability to reach households with only wireless telephones may have implications for results from health surveys, political polls, and other research. How will public opinion monitors avoid introducing bias if there are differences between people with and without landline telephones?

Are there comparable statistics for Canada?

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