The Economist is predicting the death of the landline, suggesting that the last cord in the US could be cut as soon as 2025.

We know already that this threatens to be problematic for research, since calling mobiles for phone surveys is fraught with difficulty, and techniques to harness the potential of mobile devices are proving slow to catch on.

The article also highlights how the transition will affect other industries, not to mention the emergency services. And the more people ditch their landlines, the more difficult and expensive it will become to maintain the ageing system and infrastructure.

Still, as far as research is concerned, I can’t help thinking these challenges are get-over-able. The basic idea of speaking to someone using your mouth over some kind of long distance connection seems pretty sound, so it would be a shame for the research world to get hung up on landlines. No-one else is going to miss them.