Another cord-cutting study shows VoIP users don’t use it to replacing landline

Ike Elliot pointed me to Tech Untangled’s citing of a new Harris Interactive poll on telephony usage.

The Harris Interactive data shows that about 14% of adults use a cell phone exclusively for voice communication, which aligns well with the recent CDC research which showed 15.8%.

Telephone usage chart

One interesting thing about the Harris Interactive data is they separate out Internet Telephony (VoIP) usage.

This data shows 15% of adults use VoIP, a pretty impressive number. But only 0.5% use it exclusively. That is not surprising.

What is somewhat surprising is that almost 60% of those Internet Telephony users use a landline phone too. This suggests that, for most people, VoIP is not being used as a primary service to replace landlines. In fact, the largest portion of Internet Telephony users, 57%, have all three, VOIP, Landline, and Mobile.

This suggests a disconnect with what VoIP users say they want to do, and what they actually do. We see a lot of talk about “firing your phone company” but in reality this isn’t happening, even among these first phase early adopter VoIP users.