When Ray Sands settled into Columbus, he didn't bother calling the phone company for a phone line. Instead, he opted to use his cellular phone as his primary phone.
"When I moved to Columbus, it was just convenient," said Sands, a senior in civil engineering. "Since I'm never home anyway, there's no reason to pay for a land line."
Technology is taking over and moving the old out. As more students start using their cell phones for local and long distance calls, and Internet becomes more popular in homes, many students have discovered their traditional telephones are unnecessary.
A 2002 Federal Communications Commission report on trends in telephone use estimated there were approximately 192 million local telephone lines at the end of 2000 along with 102.2 million households having telephone service. In June 2001, there were 118 million subscribers to mobile wireless services.
UNITS director Bob Corbin said there have been significant decreases in usage of UNITS long distance services because of cell phones.
"There has been a pretty substantial decrease in the last two to three years," he said. "It's about 40 percent a year. I would have to say cell phones are the majority of it."
In 2002, three million minutes of undergraduate long distance service were processed. So far this year, only 1.5 million minutes of long distance have been processed.
Corbin said he was not sure if cell phones were replacing typical land line phones, but in a survey of 1,200 Ohio State faculty members, staff and students, 70 percent had cell phones.
"Long distance in general is a dying business like pay phones were a dying business," he said. "Our customers appreciate the mobility of cell phones."
Since UNITS started offering cell phone plans two years ago, 2,000 have been sold.
UNITS is trying different approaches for long distance to keep it viable.
"We're looking at traditional service in a non-traditional way; we're selling bulk minutes for long distance and pre-paid long distance," Corbin said.
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