The recent issue of Directions, a newsletter put out by Marketing Systems Group, has a feature article on cellular telephone sampling. They are worth listening to because they and Survey Sampling have long been the manor players in the telephone sampling space. They still supply us with the data and software that we use to draw RDD samples. The highlights of the article:
- There currently are 110 million residential landline telephone numbers in the US.
- The total number of possible telephone landline numbers in the US is 1.1 billion.
- The total number of possible cellular numbers is 400 million.
- There are 250 million cellular subscribers, accounting for about 65 percent of the available numbers.
- The current estimate is that 2.3 million landline numbers have been transferred (in technical terms, ported) to a cellular phone. That’s about 5 percent of total assigned landline numbers.
- The working estimate for cell only households continues to be 15 percent.
The issue also has an interesting note on calling cell phones with a predictive dialer. This is specifically prohibited by the FCC. But according to MSG, if you ask someone for their number and they give you a cell phone number you can call it with a predictive dialer. In other words, if the cell phone number comes to us from a client in a customer sat study we can call it. As a practical matter, this happens with some regularity. Nice to know we probably are not breaking the law.
Comments
2 responses to “Interesting Telephone Numbers”
So, if you are (and I am) a cell phone only household and you give your phone number to your insurance company, they can use that number to contact me for surveys? I’ve had a cell phone only for about 4 years now and I don’t recall ever getting a call for surveys form companies that I do business with.
Since cell phone only households are on the rise, do you think the FCC will take another look at this law? The only person that I know that uses a land line is my grandma, so I beleive that within the next 10-15 years we’ll see the number of cell phone only households (at least) double.
The Do-Not-Call list would still be an option for those who do not want to be contacted.
When the FTC set up the Federal Do Not Call Registry the rules explicitly exempted fund raising by nonprofits, political polling, and customer sat. So even on landlines people you buy stuff from can call you to measure your satisfaction. So I would not expect a different rule for cells.