26m Americans Now Cellphone Only Homes

Twenty-six million American adults now shun landlines in favour of cellphones, and the figure is rising faster than ever, a new survey says.

The percentage of American adults in cellphone-only homes shot up from 7.7% to 11.8% between 2005 and 2006, according to the National Health Interview Survey. The rise is a concern for researchers, who rely largely on landline numbers to conduct phone surveys.

Over the past four years, the percentage of households with no phone at all has held steady at around 2%, but the number of people using only cellphones has more than quadrupled, so that one in seven adults is now without a landline.

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