The landline did not disappear so much as become a minority household choice, and the crossover is recent enough that people's instincts about it genuinely differ by age. The United States had roughly 268 million landlines in 2003. By 2017, 45.9% of US households still had one while 50.8% had gone cell-only - close to an even split. By 2022 the picture had tipped decisively: 73% of households used only cell phones and 25% kept both landline and cell service. The driver is infrastructural rather than a matter of taste. It is far harder to install landline copper wire to every individual user than it is to put up transmission towers, so as mobile coverage expanded, the economics of maintaining the older network stopped working. The practical consequence is generational: anyone over about fifty grew up in a house where the telephone was a shared object attached to a wall and answered on behalf of other people, and anyone younger did not. That is most of what a split on this subject is measuring.