Each new survey shows that the number of people who have forsaken their traditional landline phones keeps growing. This, coupled with changes in the way people use cell phones, is starting to impact a number of areas in ways that people might not have expected just a few months ago.

Market research company Harris Interactive recently published results of its survey on cell phone use. The results were similar to those from a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey (see "The missing phone device and the IRS"), with the only major difference being that the number of people who had dropped their traditional landline telephone
increased to about 21% (the CDC survey had 12.6% of U.S. adults living cellphone-only households). There may be some skew because the CDC report considered households and the Harris survey deals with individuals, but the trend is still clear. More and more people, particularly younger people -- about a third of 18 to 29-year-olds, for example -- are moving away from the tether of a landline phone. Most are just using a cell phone, but some (about 15%) are using various Internet-based VoIP services. In addition, only about 9% only use a landline -- half of what it was a year before.

Meanwhile, cell phones are getting smarter. ABI Research reports that the percentage of cell phones classified as "smartphones" is poised to grow from 10% of the market today to about 30% in 2013. The biggest push in this space comes from the fallout of the iPhone, with a number of direct iPhone competitors showing up at CTIA Wireless 2008 (see "iPhone clones attack CTIA!"). Smartphones, led by the iPhone, are changing the sort of things that people in the United States use phones for. (I say "in the United States" because many uses that are just starting here have been going strong for quite a while in other parts of the world.) M:Metrics is reporting that iPhone users are employing their cell phones more like normal PCs than users of other types of smartphones, and it is reasonable to expect that users of at least some of the iPhone clones will continue this trend. This, of course, will have a major impact on the traffic patterns in cell-phone networks and could lead to significant congestion in parts of some carrier networks.