It's official: according to the FCC, people in this country now have more wireless telephone subscriptions (cell phones) than land-line subscriptions. As of December 2004, we had 181.1 million wireless subscriptions (up from 167.3 million six months before); we had a mere 177.9 million old-fashioned plug-into-the-wall lines (down from 180.1 million six months before).
The number of land lines, in fact, has been dropping steadily since its peak of 192.5 million in December 2000, while the number of wireless lines has been growing by 10-15% every year. Today, the two graph curves finally crossed.
It's a new world a-comin'. My eleven-year-old doesn't really grok the fact that you used to have to plug your computer into the wall to get Internet access. How twentieth-century was that?
I would imagine that more people have access to land lines than cell phones, since it’s common for multiple people to share the same land line, but not very common for people to share cell phones.