1 in 8 Households Now Without a Wired Phone Line

Wow, talk about a sea change. Last time I saw these statistics (about two years ago), only about 5 percent of the United States had dumped its landline telephone altogether in favor of going cell-phone-only. Today, that number has jumped to 13.6 percent, or about one in eight households cutting the cord for good.

Oddly, these stats come from the National Health Interview Survey, conducted earlier this year, which offered such weird observations as the fact that those without a landline were more likely to be smokers and were twice as likely to be "binge drinkers."

That likely has to do with the personality profile of the typical cord-cutter: A whopping 55 percent of adults living with "unrelated roommates" and 31 percent of adults aged 25 to 29 had no landline. In other words, college kids and single, recent graduates make up the majority of those without a wired phone. That may explain why cell-only users are twice as likely to have no health insurance while also reporting they were in "excellent to very good" health; they're simply younger.

As with many tech trends, pint-sized buyers are clearly giving this movement its legs, and it will only continue to snowball as they get older. Of people I know who ditched the landline, none has ever later changed their mind and decided to get rewired. Watch for old-school telephone carriers to get increasingly desperate as this trend continues.

LINK: Survey: 13.6% of American homes have only cellphones