An article in yesterday’s NY Times shows why landlines will continue to dwindle and mobile phones take their place.
Although people are willing to put up with the comparatively poor quality of mobile phones, this article shows three ways that mobile quality is improving:
1) Getting a better signal.
There are two options here. The major carriers all offer a way to get what is effectively a cell phone signal using your broadband connect. Or you can buy a signal booster that works for multiple carriers.
2) Higher quality voice.
There something coming called HD Voice. It’s already available for some phones, but will only really add value when lots of phones and carriers are using it. And that’s coming, though perhaps not till 2015 or so.
3) Cheat.
You can route your cell phone calls to your landline phone. Of course, lots of people don’t have a landline phone (and that’s the issue we’re dealing with at Hyper-Reach), but we’re guessing that the same routing approach can work with a Skype number or Google voice.
The point here is that as people keep shifting toward mobile and away from landlines, there will be an increasing number of solutions to objections of the folks who are holding out. They may not address everyone’s concerns (landlines are still much more reliable), but for emergency notification services, the shift to “mobile only” doesn’t have to be 100% to be a crisis.
