Hanging up; Phone calls.(the death of the phone call)

Reports of the death of the phone call are greatly exaggerated

WHILE the computing cloud expands ever more, the humble phone call is in terminal decline, thanks to text messaging and the mobile internet. So, at least, say commentators in Silicon Valley. Some have already penned obituaries. "The phone call is dead", read a recent headline in TechCrunch, a blog and currently the central organ of the high-tech region. But is it really time to hang up?

There is no doubt that landline calls are past their prime. The time people spend talking on a fixed telephone has gone down in recent years in nearly all rich countries for which the International Telecommunication Union has data. Yet in most, this fall is more than offset by the increase in mobile calls, according to a recent report by Ofcom, the British telecoms regulator (see chart).

Ofcom also found that cost, more than anything, determined how long people talk for and whether they prefer a landline or a mobile call. Should Germany's rates for wireless conversation--currently twice the rate of landline calls--come down, people would certainly spend more than 112 minutes per month talking on handsets.

The strongest support for the notion of the disappearing phone call comes from America. Nielsen, a research firm, reports that the amount of time mobile subscribers talk has dropped to 700 minutes per month in 2010. That includes incoming calls. A survey by CTIA, a trade group, shows that the average length of a mobile call has dropped from just over three minutes to one minute and 40 seconds since mid-2007.

Less talking does not necessarily mean less phone use. According to Nielsen the number of paid texts per subscriber has grown rapidly over the same period, recently surpassing 700 per month. This is mainly thanks to the restless fingers of teenagers, who are also buying more smartphones--essentially hand-held computers that let them send messages via social networks. Facebook, the world's biggest such network, recently announced that a third of its nearly 600m members access the service on their mobile phones.

Yet in Britain, where teenagers have been texting for longer, the spread of smartphones has not had the same effect, says Steve Alder, the general manager for devices at Telefonica Europe, which operates the O2 brand. British subscribers with smartphones talk 11% longer than owners of simpler handsets, Mr Alder says. The young are both more talkative and more text-hungry.

New technologies often fail to displace old ones. Research from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that young Americans are watching more television even as they spend more time on the computer. And an old form of communication may stage a comeback in a different form. Skype, the internet phone service, is growing rapidly. In the first half of 2010 users racked up 95 billion minutes in voice and video calls.

Odds are that the conventional phone call will be just one of many forms of telecommunication. And for most people outside of Silicon Valley, where some entrepreneurs allegedly do not even know how to use their smartphone to place a phone call, it will remain the most important one for some time to come. That should be welcomed by all those who relish the gentle art of conversation--and dreaded by parents who pay the bills.