The end of the line for the home phone

Research carried out by Asda recently revealed that a third of us have given up on having a stand alone home telephone and that this figure rises to 48% for the 18-34 year old age group. This shift in our home telephone usage means that telephone lines are increasingly being used for broadband connections and little else.

Partly as a result of their survey, Asda have decided to stop selling landline handsets and concentrate instead on the sale of a range of smart phones from top of the range phones to those costing as little as £40. The question remains how long it will be before other retailers follow suit.

When it comes to business telephony the picture is more varied. The majority of businesses still rely on having a fixed office space with telephones at every desk. However, here too the picture is slowly changing. Businesses are gradually waking up to the benefits of internet telephony, both from the basis of cost savings and flexibility. This means that whereas offices still contain telephone handsets, these may well be dedicated internet telephony handsets or linked to the internet via a virtual switchboard.

On cost alone, internet telephony tends to win hands down over traditional land lines. VoIP (internet) to Voip calls can range in cost from being free to a few pence per minute and even VoIP to landline calls result in cost savings. This applies equally to international calls as it does to domestic ones, allowing businesses to improve communication links with international clients and suppliers.

Linking the VoIP telephone system to a virtual switchboard also brings other benefits such as call recording and storage or intelligent routing. This latter service enables businesses to forward calls to any other handset including mobile, meaning that the smallest business can always stay in touch.

It is possible that apart from the benefits of smart phones, one of the drivers behind the decline in home telephone lines is the conflict when a single line is required by several family members at the same time. Internet telephony and virtual switchboards can remove that conflict within an office environment with switchboards being able to handle tens of thousands of calls per hour. So, whilst the traditional single office telephone line may go the way of the home phone, the internet and VoIP lines are well on their way to taking its place.