72 per cent of Canadian homes now have at least one cellphone
Gillian Shaw
Sun
The traditional land-line telephone seems in danger of heading the way of the telegram.
Cell, cable and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services are gaining ground, with less than 25 per cent of Canadian homes relying solely on land-line service, according to a residential telephone survey released Wednesday by Statistics Canada.
Land lines as the only household phone service dropped to 24 per cent (3.1 million households) by December 2007, down from 29.6 per cent (3.8 million households) in December 2006.
British Columbia and Alberta are leading the shift away from land lines, while in Newfoundland-Labrador and New Brunswick, callers are holding onto the traditional service in higher numbers.
“There are no surprises in this survey, it bears out what we’ve seen,” said Shawn Hall, spokesman for Telus. “There is strong growth in the wireless industry and moderate loss in our home phones as that area of the industry faces increased competition.”
Hall said that while the cable companies are appealing to traditional land-line customers, Telus is making inroads in television service, which has been the traditional market of cable companies.
Hall said deregulation of the home phone business has also helped with the company bundling broadband Internet access and other services to compete.
In Alberta, only 14.3 per cent of households rely on a land line only for phone service, while in B.C. that number dropped to 20.8 per cent in 2007, down from 27.8 in 2006.
Canada-wide, land lines are still found in 86.9 per cent of households, but their dominance as the only phone service is in decline. Across the country, 72.4 per cent of households reported having at least one cellphone in the 2007 survey, up from 67.1 per cent in 2006.
More than six per cent of households across Canada reported they rely on a cellphone only for service, up from around five per cent in 2006.
British Columbia has the highest rate of cellphone-only users, at 10.2 per cent. Cable or VoIP services with or without other services are used by 13.1 per cent of households in the province, up from 8.9 per cent in 2006.
Canada continues to lag behind other countries in cellphone use, but Hall said it is catching up with the United States, and our low land-line services compared to places like Europe mean there is not as much incentive for consumers to switch to cellphone-only service.
“In Canada, you have the lowest home-phone service prices in the world,” he said. “In other countries, their home phone rates are less attractive.”
Canada-wide, 14.9 per cent of households use cable or VoIP, up from 10.7 per cent in 2007.
The survey — which was carried out for Bell Aliant, Bell Canada, MTS Allstream Inc., Northwestel Inc., SaskTel and Telus — also found that just 0.9 per cent of Canadian households don’t have any phone service, a figure that is down slightly from 1.3 per cent in 2006.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008