Fixed phone lines to go way of the dodo?

A report issued by the ACMA today - the fifth in the "telecommunications today" series - reveals a quarter of households say they would consider replacing fixed-line telephone service with "another form" of communication.

The problem? The price of mobile calls is still considered too high by many respondents for them to switch. If the price of mobile calls fell, many survey respondents indicated they would replace their fixed telephone line.

The result seems to bode well for the future of naked DSL in Australia, which doesn't require monthly fixed line telephone rental fees.

The ACMA survey found 90% of Australian homes have both a fixed phone line and a mobile phone, and that the line between which services are complimentary to each other is becoming increasingly blurred.

More importantly, nearly half (45%) of people with both fixed line and mobiles prefer to use mobiles as their main calling method.

The report breaks consumers up into large groups. We would have picked "Enthusiastic Embracers" to be overly affectionate people, but instead they're the group most likely to jump into VoIP, 3G Internet access and above all a drive towards voice substitution --- using alternatives to fixed line services, in other words. If you are an Enthusiastic Embracer, you're more likely to view a mobile phone plan cost as a necessary service, and in contrast a fixed line fee as an unnecessary expense, which is exactly the market that Naked DSL targets.

The 10% of homes without both mobile and fixed lines (the "Techno non-adopters", a term we'd have presumed also applied to fans of cool Jazz) tended to be older Australians (86% of those over 61 and 91% retirees), and mostly female -- 63% of the non-adopters, in fact.

The report comes a week after the ACMA announced that there were now more mobile phones in Australia than people. Presumably the numerical superiority of sheep is still in place, but if 10% of Australians (plus all the infants who wouldn't have been part of the survey anyway) don't have a mobile, that means the rest of us must have more of them.

See also this week: Internode drops $39 transfer fee
Internode chops ADSL prices

Plus check out our Massive Naked DSL Buyer's Guide

So, who out there has a dozen or more, and why?