“Here's how much you're calling on average each month: 51 minutes. [This] is an average of your monthly usage based on your last 3 bills up to 5 May 2010.”
That means that, averaged out over a year, we talk on phonecalls that we make less than 2 minutes a day. Time was, we had page after page of itemised calls. Now, they never even fill a partial page—if any at all. Of course, this doesn’t count calls we receive, but we can go days without using the landline phone at all, so I doubt there are many minutes a month spent on them, either.
Instead of the landline, I use my cellphone (especially for text messages), various online methods and I use Skype for international calls. NONE of that was possible when I arrived in New Zealand in 1995. Even email was of limited use.
In 1995, I had an email account, but not many of my friends or family in America did. I got my first cellphone several years later, but I couldn’t send text messages to anyone in the US because their phones either couldn’t yet do texts, or else the costs were too high—for them (in New Zealand, we’ve always paid only to send texts and make cellphone calls, never to receive them). The things I now take for granted, like Skype, didn’t exist yet, not that it mattered, because neither did broadband: Everyone was still on dial-up.
Advances in the Internet and telephony over the past 15 years have absolutely made my life much easier and better, and I now have many instant communication options where I once had only a traditional landline telephone. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead, and what I’ll be using 15 years from now.
51 minutes per month on landline phone calls? Frankly, I’m kind of surprised that it’s even that much.
2 comments:
Whereas I talked with my sister in SD for 2.5 hours at one sitting in April.
I usually use Skype for those kinds of calls. Often with the video camera turned on. Free videophone calls to the other side of the planet—could it get more 21st Century?
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