The Phoneless in the Broadband Age: A Pilot Study in Massachusetts

Abstract

Questions about universal service continue to evolve with our information and communication services. Though universal service began as a corporate strategy to support monopoly, it is now a policy to prevent some sectors of society from being excluded from access to communication and information. Concern about exclusion historically applies to telephones but increasingly to Internet and more recently broadband. In other words, as our technology advances and brings us new platforms and services, the concerns about exclusion remain. While the universal service literature is rich in econometric studies that indicate the drivers of household telephone penetration, without the stories of those households that experience phonelessness, we cannot understand the causes well enough to design effective policy. The purpose of the Massachusetts pilot study is to better understand why people are phoneless.

Using data obtained from interviews with approximately 100 individuals in Massachusetts who are currently without any voice connection, either landline or mobile, or have been so in the past ten years, we start to get an idea of the causes of phonelessness and the preferences of this population regarding voice and other forms of communication. Exclusion from voice and exclusion from broadband are inherently the same problem, though currently at different stages. When broadband matures there is likely to be an excluded population comparable to the current phoneless population. By focusing on the excluded households in the mature platform we can learn more about the obstacles to maintaining connectivity that are relevant to broadband and future platforms. The survey used in this study is designed to include questions about different platforms and communication services in order to learn about the preferences of this population as well. The results of the pilot study show that the vast majority of phoneless households do not prefer to be phoneless. The study also shows that the most frequent causes of phonelessness in this population are unemployment and unpredictable telephone bills. Many instances of unpredictable bills leading to phonelessness occur with wireless service or bundled services. Prepaid wireless service helps households prevent phonelessness.