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.

They also provide services that hook up voice mail to both office and cellular phones, and allow calls made to office phones to ring a cell phone as well.

UNITS does not have immediate plans to follow the lead of Marshall University, which provides cell phones in addition to a land line for internet in four of their residence halls.

“The challenges you’ve got on this is instead of having one telephone per room, you have one telephone per student,” Corbin said. “If the university has to provide cellular service, it would increase the cost.”

Other problems for the replacement of land phones are coverage areas and locating 911 calls made from cell phones. Land lines are still slightly less expensive than cellular phones and usually require subscribers to change their phone number when switching services.

“I think as cellular becomes more reliable, as soon as 911 issues are resolved and coverage issues are resolved, there’s probably going to be less reliance on land lines from a customer standpoint,” Corbin said.

“Once customers become more comfortable with wireless services, they’d become less dependent on traditional land line services,” he said.

At Digital Plus, it has been discussed to replace home lines but most customers are still getting plans for normal usage.

“We’ve had people coming in saying that eventually they’d want to do that,” said Moraya White, Digital Plus sales representative. “Mostly it’s just regular cell phone service.”

White said the ability to instantly connect with someone gives cell phones an advantage over home phones.

“It’s the constant connection – being able to have contact with a person throughout the day,” she said. “Even if you don’t get a hold of them, you still have voice mail.”

White said land phones might still be useful for people who don’t want to take business calls, telemarketing or calls about bills on their cell phones.

Paul Ramsey, a junior in veterinary medicine, has kept his home line due to bad reception around his house and Internet access. He splits his calls evenly between his cell phone and his home phone.

“If I’m out of the house, I use my cell phone and if I’m in the house, I use my phone,” he said. “I very rarely use my cell phone in the house.”