At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts

Here's what I posted on the Reddit thread (http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/73s7b/out_of_438...) for this article:

When I went there (01-05), there was a telephone signup form from Verizon in the orientation materials and it cost $17/month.

Landline use dropped off precipitously in 2002 when they started including a form you could use to have your cellphone listed in the campus directory instead of automatically listing your room phone. In 01, there were only like a dozen people in the freshman class without a room phone. In 02, that had jumped to maybe 20%, and by the time I graduated, the vast majority (maybe 80%) were cell-phone only.

I had a landline for freshman and senior years - freshman because you couldn't list a cellphone in the campus directory, and senior because I was living on the ground floor of a dorm on the low side of campus (Amherst is on a hill) and didn't get good cell reception in my room.

A common theme in the halls of carriers and ISPs is that they want to evolve from being dumb pipes to value-added portals and content destinations. For example, the cell phone industry's solution to this is to sell ringtones (among other things).

I think that these numbers really highlight the folly of that line of thinking. These entire methods of communicating have been outmoded -- while nobody's saying that people are going to stop talking on the phone to each other, watching kids (defined as people and their peer groups who have always owned SMS capable phones) use their telephones is entirely different than the way people who didn't grow up with SMS do. The devices are more like portable IM terminals that can make phone calls when they need to talk to someone, particularly people outside their demographic.

At first I was kind of skeptical about 4G mobile technology, where every application runs in an IP stack -- even voice. It hasn't taken very many of these articles to convince me that this is absolutely going to happen, and sooner than I thought at first. But much to the dismay of the carriers, this growth is going to happen in spite of their portals, not because of it.

People are communicating in communities several layers abstracted from the infrastructure they're paying for. This is pretty disruptive, especially to the ISPs that are providing the means as they try to diversify into areas that are basically mature and becoming legacy (telephone and cable).

I don't have any magic solution or proposal for innovating in the space but it's going to be fascinating to watch the evolution.

This data doesn't surprise me whatsoever. I'm an undergrad and these numbers are close to what I'd predict for my university. I don't know a single person with a landline. Everyone I know owns a laptop and has it registered on the university network. I'm incredibly surprised whenever I meet someone and find that they don't have a facebook profile. The only difference is that I don't know as many people with an iPhone/iPod touch, but I suspect that's because most people in my class (c/o 2009) have cell phones and older generation iPods and don't feel the need to replace them.

As far as telephones and facebook go, I would say it's about the same at my college (SUNY Brockport). The college gives every room a free landline (and as of this year, a phone to go with it) - but I only know of one person that doesn't have a cell phone and chooses to use the landline instead.

Whereas I don't know of anyone without a facebook account. Not to say that everyone checks the facebook account daily, but the account exists.

Though the bit about Mac's vs PC's doesn't pan out over here.

I thought that said landmines for a second

As a current college student, something bugs me about this... Not sure what, but this looks awfully strange.