Hanging up: Irish people say goodbye to landline calls … again

In the long lists of lockdown cliches — Zoom quizzes, sourdough bread, abject fear of heavy-breathing joggers — there is one habit that usually gets left out: the old-school telephone call.

After years of decline for first fixed-line voice minutes and then mobile voice minutes, pandemic-stricken 2020 saw the kind of surges in both that would make a time traveller wonder what exactly had happened to prompt this sudden explosion of talk.

Total voice traffic minutes in the regulated Irish market climbed 9.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the final three months of 2019, meaning we collectively spent 341 million minutes more on “traditional” phone calls — the figures exclude the time spent on audio calls through services like WhatsApp — in the period when the Covid crisis unfolded.

Voice call minutes soared even more, this time by 11.9 per cent, in the socially distanced second quarter of 2020, while “Lockdown 3.0″ in the first quarter of 2021 brought another bump upwards, although on that occasion, the effect was less pronounced.

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What was especially striking about this resurgent era for the telephone call was the performance of the humble landline. With the arrival of a string of modern competitors, and more recently the cultural shift away from all voice calls, fixed voice minutes seemed destined to head only south. Indeed, in the year before Covid, they were in something of a tailspin, declining more than 20 per cent between the fourth quarters of 2018 and 2019.

But we hadn’t said goodbye just yet: fixed voice minutes increased 13.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2020 and then by a further 12.7 per cent in the second stuck-at-home one, according to figures from communications regulator ComReg.

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The latest ComReg update, however, suggests normal business has resumed. Landline, what landline? After clambering back up to 724.5 million minutes in the second quarter of 2020, dropping back, then tipping up again during the first full Covid winter to reach 667.1 million minutes in the first quarter of 2021, fixed voice call minutes are collapsing once more.

In the first quarter of 2022, they were lower than they were in the quarter before the pandemic, at just 458 million minutes, less than half of which are landline calls to other Irish landlines. Fixed voice minutes slipped 9.9 per cent on a quarterly basis. Annually, they have plummeted by a whopping 31.3 per cent.

We are, once again, no longer hanging on the telephone. Indeed, we may look back upon the pandemic as the landline’s last hurrah.