The number of UK landline calls has almost halved in the past six years, as Britons rely increasingly on their mobiles.
The UK made 54bn minutes worth of landline calls throughout 2017, down from 103bn in 2012, research from Ofcom found. During the same period, call minutes made on mobiles rose from 132.1bn to 148.6bn. Comparatively, data use rose substantially from 0.2 gigabytes in 2012 to 1.9 gigabytes in 2017.
There are currently 1.3bn landline phone numbers in the UK, 400m of which are currently allocated to telecoms operators, the research found. In the future broadband, which does not require an area code, is likely to become the preferred medium for making calls over the traditional telephone line.
Consequently, Ofcom suggests the UK’s 610 area codes could die out altogether. “Some of us can remember a time when we stored phone numbers in our head, rather than our mobile. But the way we use and feel about telephone numbers is changing,” said “In the future, as more calls are made over broadband, dialling codes won’t need to be fixed to a particular part of the country. So the question is – could area codes become a thing of the past?” said Liz Greenberg, Head of Numbering at Ofcom. The number of residential UK landlines rose by 1 per cent in 2017, which Ofcom attributed to an uptake in fixed broadband packages as a needs to access the internet.
News source: INews
