The volume of phone calls has surged more than internet use as people want to hear each other’s voices in the pandemic.
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Alyssa MacKenzie, 32, rarely used her smartphone to make phone calls, apart from the occasional conversation for her work as a disability rights advocate.
But when the lockdown for the coronavirus set in, Ms. MacKenzie could no longer pop by her mother’s house a few minutes away in New Canaan, Conn. So she has called her multiple times a day, including once recently to get a recipe for pasta e fagioli.
A couple of hours later, she said, they were still talking.
“We started with the recipe, then talked about my younger brother, then my work, then her day, and next thing I knew, the soup was done,” Ms. MacKenzie said. “I needed to hear the familiarity of her voice.”
Phone calls have made a comeback in the pandemic. While the nation’s biggest telecommunications providers prepared for a huge shift toward more internet use from home, what they didn’t expect was an even greater surge in plain old voice calls, a medium that had been going out of fashion for years.
Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year. Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.
In contrast, internet traffic is up around 20 percent to 25 percent from typical daily patterns, AT&T and Verizon said.
The rise is stunning given how voice calls have long been on the decline. Some 90 million wired phone lines in the United States have ceased using landline phones since 2000, according to USTelecom. Wireless calls replaced much of that calling activity, but the volume of minutes spent on phone calls hasn’t changed much over the past decade as people turned to texting and to apps like FaceTime and WhatsApp, according to wireless carriers and analysts.