Cord Cutting
Cord cutting is in the news this week. Forrester Research has just released a report indicating that the percentage of cord-cutters has increased from 5% to 8% of U.S. mobile phone users. These are people who have given up their home phone line because their mobile phone serves them better.
Friday’s Wall Street Journal also pointed to a study by NPD Group indicating that 12% of U.S. cellphone users reported their mobile was their only phone. Another 42% indicated that, although they still had a land-line phone, they used their cellphone most.
What does this mean? It means that, in American’s minds, mobility has clearly been built into how they use telephones. When was the last time at home that you used a telephone with a cord attached to it? Even if you’re still using a land-line at home, you’re probably using a cordless phone so you can carry on your conversation anywhere in the home (or even in the yard) that’s convenient for you. The value of mobility is obvious, even within these limiting constraints.
So, why don’t more people take the next step and fully buy into mobility - why have only 8% (Forrester) or 12% (NPD) switched entirely to a mobile phone, which eliminates those constraints and basically makes your “home” phone available to you virtually 100% of the time? Well, both research and logic tell us that the following factors all come into play:
- Signal strength/call quality inside the home may be lacking
- Multiple people in the home all share one fixed phone line
- If DSL is your preferred Internet connection, the phone company often requires you to buy fixed phone service to get a decent broadband rate
- Mobile phone minutes are generally more expensive than fixed phone minutes
Given these factors, it’s amazing that even 8% have cut the cord. But many of these concerns are being addressed (e.g. see here and here).
To me, the more interesting question is why more businesses aren’t cutting the cord. If anyone can appreciate the value of mobility, it should be businesses who can translate increased productivity, faster response times, and better access to information into measurable financial returns.
Network World recently reported on Ford Motor Company’s experience with 8,000 employees that had cut the cord. Ford’s experiences have generally been positive. The employees in the plan are highly mobile and they’ve responded very favorably to the change. They work in collaborative teams that have taken full advantage of instant connectivity, wherever team-members happen to be (or at least almost - if you’ve seen the TV ads…)
However, Ford doesn’t plan on significantly expanding the program. Specific issues raised in the article include lack of business-focused mobile devices, lack of wireless-wireline integration, and mobile services are still too consumer-focused.
Knowing that these are big areas of focus for the country’s largest wireless carriers (see here and here and here and here), I hope that more businesses will begin to realize the viability of a mobile device as the primary communications tool for their employees.
That doesn’t mean they will immediately cut the cord, but as that big old phone increasingly collects dust on the desktop, you never know…