If you want to make a call, you use a landline phone – that’s how it used to be. Then cell phones came and the situation gradually changed. The falling demand accelerated with the arrival of smartphones.
Fewer and fewer people are using landline phones. Last year there were 80 billion call minutes in the fixed network in Germany and thus 13 billion fewer than in 2021, the Federal Network Agency said in response to a dpa request. In 2020 it was 104 billion minutes. At that time, the pandemic and its restrictions ensured that people were at home a lot and picked up the phone more than before. However, this corona-related upswing in the fixed network was short-lived. A Verivox survey also proves the dwindling demand for landline telephones.
Interest has been declining for a long time because many people are increasingly talking to each other or just chatting via online services such as Whatsapp or Signal. Another factor in the declining demand is that many mobile phone calls are no longer billed per minute, but are paid as a monthly flat rate – so it is not more expensive to use a cell phone than a landline phone. In 2022, all mobile phone calls in Germany lasted a total of 159 billion minutes, i.e. twice as many minutes as for landline calls. According to the network agency, it was 126 minutes per month per active SIM card.
While the authority’s information relates to the period up to the end of 2022, a Verivox survey conducted in May provides information on the current state of affairs. The finding: the interest in landline telephone calls continues to dwindle. Of 1,005 respondents, 70 percent stated that they used their stationary connection to make phone calls at home. A year earlier, the figure was 81 percent. According to the most recent survey, only every fifth person uses the landline telephone on a daily basis.
The survey by the price comparison portal also showed that older people use the stationary connection to make calls more often than younger people. There is also an urban-rural divide: the smaller a city is, the more common it is to use a landline telephone.
Source: Stern
