Cellular phone expenditures surpassed spending on residential landline phone services beginning in 2007, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey report released last week. In 2001, cellular phone service held about 23% of the market; by 2007 cell phones held 55% of the market.
It’s one of those statistics that seems almost invisible as cell phones have become such a part of daily life. But the stat verifies massive technology shifts of the past 15 years from fax to email to mobile devices. For distributors, a key aspect of this transition has been new product development in the past 10 years – datacomm products, smart sensors, wireless technology – that has spawned new product lines and life cycles, as well as emerging customer segments.
A little added perspective: Some of us in a superior state of aging remember the original phone exchange or central office, where the telephone company owned buildings in every neighborhood with banks of switches and relays with twisted-pair wires out to every house. Mine in St. Louis was Woodland 2, or WO2-5585. I believe it was in the early Sixties when it was a shocker of a transition to go from the abbreviated exchange letters to numbers.
The graph below is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
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