Landline Use In Steep Decline

The use of landline telephone services has been steadily declining for years. As more and more people switch to wireless or net telephony, the impact on political polling is negligible.

For nearly three in 10 U.S. households, don't even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.

The federal figures, released Wednesday, showed that reliance on cells is continuing to rise at the expense of wired telephones. In the second half of last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones, while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly all their calls on their cells.

The number of wireless-only households grew by 2 percentage points since the first half of last year. Underscoring the rapid growth, in early 2004 just percent had only cell phones.

Households with cell phones who rarely if ever use their landlines grew by 1 percentage point since the first half of last year.

The only thing keeping some families tethered to a traditional landline is the need for dial-up Internet access in areas where broadband is unavailable or unaffordable:

Such families often either have their landline hooked exclusively to a computer or rely so heavily on their cells that they ignore landline calls because they are probably from telephone solicitors, said Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the report.

This decline in revenue from landlines is typified by the predatory nature of some local telephone companies, who are doing whatever is necessary to continue to collect revenue from customers:

A widow rented a rotary dial telephone for 42 years, paying what her family calculates as thousands of dollars for a now outdated phone.

Ester Strogen, 82, of Canton, first leased two black rotary phones — the kind whose round dial is moved manually with your finger — in the 1960s. Back then, the technology was new and most people had to rent telephones as part of their basic phone service. It was pre-AT&T when the telephone business was monopolized by the company known as "Ma Bell."

Bell was disbanded in 1983 and split into seven smaller companies and AT&T was given the right to handle long-distance and telephone-leasing services. From 1985 to 1986, customers who leased telephones were given the option to continue leasing, buy them or opt out of their agreements.

Until two months ago, Strogen was still paying AT&T to use the phones — $29.10 every three months, the phone company says. Strogen's granddaughters, Melissa Howell and Barb Gordon, ended the arrangement when they discovered the bills.

"I'm outraged," Gordon said. "It made me so mad. It's ridiculous. If my own grandmother was doing it, how many other people are?"

The number of customers leasing phones dropped from 40 million nationwide to about 750,000 today, said John Skalko, spokesman for Murray Hill, N.J.-based Lucent Technologies, a spinoff of AT&T that manages the residential leasing service.

Polling impact

The CBS news article cited above makes a largely unproven assumption that the decline in landline use and the increase in cellular telephone-only households is having, or will have, an impact on organizations that poll or survey American households:

The trends have an important impact on polling organizations, which rely chiefly on calls to random landline phone numbers. Calling cell phone users can be more costly for pollsters, in part because federal law forbids unsolicited calls to cell phones made by computerized dialing systems used heavily by pollsters.

Studies have shown that so far, people who have only cell phones do not give significantly different answers to questions than those who use landlines. Pollsters, though, are under growing pressure to survey the growing number of cell phone users and some already do so.

There are plenty of indications that this is not a significant enough problem to distrust poll or survey results:

In particular, there is no evidence that the polling in the Democratic and Republican nomination contests is biased by the fact that most polls rely only on landline interviews. In the December national poll, support for no candidate in the landline sample changed by more than two points when the preferences of cell phone respondents were blended in. The same was true in the October national poll.

There is no doubt that Americans who rely solely on cell phones differ from the rest of the public in some key respects. However, in most cases these differences are the result of their demographic characteristics, particularly the fact they tend to be very young. Since adjustments for age are made in standard landline surveys, adding the cell-only component to the survey substantially increases the raw number of younger people surveyed, but does not alter the overall weight of younger respondents in the final estimates.

In most respects, the political attitudes and behaviors of younger people who are cell-only do not differ substantially from younger people surveys do reach on landlines, meaning that the overall results are virtually identical to those from the landline survey alone.

Net Telephony Vulnerable to Hacking

The popularity of net telephony or Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communication has allowed many people to break free of land-line or cellular phone service. However, a series of security issues are forcing companies to take steps to protect the identities and privacy of customers:

A new type of identity fraud, which sees hackers tapping into voice-over IP telephony accounts, has been highlighted by a VoIP equipment maker.

Usernames and passwords from voice-over IP (VoIP) phone accounts are selling online for more than stolen credit cards, Newport Networks has found.

The information allows someone to use the telephone service for free.

Net telephony fraud is still in its infancy, with eavesdropping on calls being the most common security flaw.

But the move into stealing usernames and passwords which are routinely sent across the network when a call is made, is a worrying new trend thinks Dave Gladwin, vice president of products at Newport Networks.

"It is still at an embryonic stage but as voice adoption increases it becomes more of a problem and needs addressing," said Mr Gladwin.

The details are not sent as plain text but are encoded in such a way as to be "easily captured and unobscured", said Mr Gladwin.

Security issues are nothing new in the VoIP world. As far back as 2002, companies were being told of vulnerabilities:

But some security organizations are cautioning users about the dangers of unsecured VOIP services. For instance, in an August 2001 paper on its Web site, the Bethesda, Md.-based SANS Institute warned of privacy- and authentication-related issues stemming from VOIP services and urged users to apply the same precautions they've used to protect their data services.

"With the convergence of the voice and data worlds, the real similarities of the security concerns will become apparent," the SANS report said, urging users to take measures such as encrypting voice services, building redundancy into their VOIP networks, locking down their VOIP servers and performing regular security audits.

The security issues involved range from lack on encryption to network vulnerabilities:

Shawn Merdinger, an independent security consultant based in Austin, Texas, has worked with Cisco Systems Inc. He's tested around a dozen WiFi VOIP handsets and deskphones and says that security problems range from potential denial-of-service attacks to more serious issues that allow "deep access" to the device that lets a remote attacker read sensitive information on the phone.

You can see his postings on many of the devices tested, along with some workarounds here. In the wake of Merdinger's findings, Cisco Systems Inc. have issued firmware upgrades for the devices in question.

Such threats are inevitable. So it's up to vendors to forestall them, according to analyst Paul Stamp, of Forrester Research Inc.

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Here's a Top 5 list of enterprise WiFi VOIP security issues, and some ways to guard against them:

Widespread deployment equals a security headache: Because of the "ubiquity of deployment" in many enterprises, attacks can spread quickly and be targeted to take down multiple devices at once. IT managers should stay up to the minute with phone upgrades, and consider running phones over a separate physical or virtual LAN as a defense against these attacks.

Many points of attack: As the phones get more sophisicated, so could the points of entry for malicious attacks increase. Bluetooth, email, client Web browsers, SMS, WiFi, media players, and image viewers could open back doors for hackers. Though users can use open-source and commercial tools to continually test their phones and networks, they'll ultimately have to rely on vendors to do proactive testing on these devices.

Targeting phones in public environments: For example, a Bluetooth scanner could be hidden at the entrance to a major airport or train station and be used to grab user data. It may be best to keep Bluetooth and other wireless features swicthed off when not needed.

Rogue again: Meanwhile, at the office and on the road, users and IT departments will have to keep their guard up and scan for rogue access points. Hackers will set up access points to specifically target WiFi phones in the corporate space as well as at hotels, conferences, and other places business people like to congregate. Good device authentication and encryption can help provide protection here.

Targeted attacks: Targeted attacks on specific voice-over-wireless networks could also be an issue, albeit one that the victims may try to downplay. "There will be targeted attacks on VoIP networks [from hackers or competitors] that will be kept quiet if there is no legal requirement for disclosure or obvious public knowledge," Merdinger says.

The BBC story cited above highlights a common problem facing the net telephony industry--a lack of security:

"90% of carriers don't offer a secure VoIP service," said Mr Gladwin.

He estimated it would cost around [est. $4-6] £2/£3 per subscriber for service providers to instigate the additional level of security needed.

"Most of the software out there has the capability of running in secure mode if the service providers would accept it," he said.

Due to the fact that "hacking" a VoIP phone or network requires some sophistication, there is some comfort in the fact that the overall number of subscribers have relatively little to fear because of the fact that net telephony is relatively uncommon. Some companies have already initiated security upgrades and fixes:

VoIP provider Skpe said its service, unlike some of its rivals, offered end to end encryption.

"It doesn't matter whether I'm on an open wireless connection, there is no way someone could get hold of my username or password," said Jonathan Christensen, general manager of audio and video at Skype.

He accepts there are security issues facing the industry, especially for providers that use "less robust security mechanisms" but he questions how big a draw a free VoIP account would be for net criminals.

This is a view shared by Jupiter analyst Ian Fogg.

"I have not seen security issues with VoIP as a big issue. This is partly because such services aren't that mainstream and therefore have not been targeted by criminals in the way that e-mail and online banking services have," he said.

Some companies have already begun investing heavily in security

Georgia Tech Information Security Center is collaborating with BellSouth and Internet Security Systems for a two-year program to study security issues with VoIP technology. The group said it planned to explore issues such as voice spam, modelling of VoIP traffice, mobile phone security, security of VoIP applications running on user agents, as well as a security analysis of VoIP protocols and implementations.

BellSouth and Internet Security Systems each committed $300,000 for the research program, and will have access to the resulting intellectual property.

“As communication services migrate to Internet-based platforms, it is important that the security and dependability users expect in the current public switched networks be maintained with these new converged technologies,” the group said in a statement.