[dmatthewson]

From the article, the CDC finds reduced landline use correlated with smoking and drinking, and thus poor health outcomes. There's a sort of inference that one has to do with the other.

Many pay as you go cell plans can cost less than land plans, especially with all the taxes and fees. It's a luxury to own both. Therefore poor people, who are more likely to smoke, are thus more likely to both smoke and have only a cell phone.

Regarding drinking the correlation is that people who only have a landline binge drink less. This is clearly because the tiny 8% that have land line only are mostly much older retired and rural people who just are not part of the cell phone generations. Binge drinking is correlated with youth and so this metric follows from age and not phone use.

Not having a land line does not cause people to smoke or drink, nor is not having a landline a dangerous daredevil maneuver. It's an economic one. And having only a landline is a factor of age demographics.

In my own case I can certainly afford both but I only have a cell because the land line has constant heavy static making it useless for understanding speech, and since phone lines are now shared responsibility of many companies, none take responsibility for fixing them. Equipment falls apart and falls into disrepair. Service calls take weeks of calls to get done and the service personnel have to come in from out of state and are incompetent and incapable of fixing problems. As a result, no one in my entire area maintains their land line any more since none of our phone lines work.

It's an infrastructure issue just like decaying and falling apart bridges. Cell reception just works and is cheaper. However my case and that of my neighbors, that of decaying infrastructure is possibly atypical or a minority reason for cell phone only use compared to the income and age reasons of others.

[erroneousfunk]

The article didn't imply at all that the factors were directly related. The CDC is tasked with finding health information and trends in the population. If they're missing a large, segment of the population that has very different health trends than the rest of the population, that's a problem and they want to address it, no matter what the reasoning behind the correlation is.

They did talk about controlling for age and income in the article. While the effect was reduced, it was still there. So I'm not entirely sure what your point is, based on the article.

[goodJobWalrus]

I haven't had a landline since 2000, so I'm not really up to date with this stuff, but I assumed that what is being referred as a 'land line' today is really a VoIP home phone.

[pixl97]

>but I assumed that what is being referred as a 'land line' today is really a VoIP home phone.

That does bring a few interesting questions. Does a land line count as a

1. Copper pair from the telephone company, or other fully dedicated digital service?

2. Hybrid service, such as VoIP to a provided CPE such as service commonly provided by cable companies?

3. VoIP only services that can be run on any compatible wired or wireless device?

Number 1 is going away as fast as possible, and just about everyone wants the service to go away too, it is massively expensive to operate from a value proposition. There are a few users who do rely on its ability to keep working under failure conditions such as mass power outages and that equipment using it has been around quite some time and is well tested.

Number 2 is the most common new rollout I see the work environments I am around. The cable company offers service at less than half the cost of the telco here. No long distance fees and fast provisioning have lead to massive migration from businesses looking at reducing communications costs and consolidating their communications billing by one invoice or more.