IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/telpol/v19y1995i6p477-485.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Beyond universal service: Characteristics of Americans without telephones, 1980-1993

Author

Listed:
  • Schement, Jorge Reina

Abstract

This paper explores the characteristics of Americans who lack home telephone service by drawing on FCC and Census data covering the period 1980-1993. It focuses on groups who have experienced lower than average telephone penetration per household - the elderly, the poor, women and children, blacks and Hispanics, and rural Americans. Income was found to be the single most influential factor in predicting the presence of a telephone in the home, although strong mitigating factors were also identified. Low penetration rates were found among women single heads of households. Low rates were also found among the two minorities studied in comparison with the white majority, even when controlled for income. Finally, the elderly, once thought to suffer from isolation, were found to enjoy higher than average telephone penetration rates. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of lingering questions and proposes considerations for policies that might lead to higher levels of participation.

Suggested Citation

  • Schement, Jorge Reina, 1995. "Beyond universal service: Characteristics of Americans without telephones, 1980-1993," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 19(6), pages 477-485, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:telpol:v:19:y:1995:i:6:p:477-485
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0308596195000252
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jayakar, Krishna & Liu, Chun, 2014. "Universal service in China and India: Legitimating the state?," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(2), pages 186-199.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:telpol:v:19:y:1995:i:6:p:477-485. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/30471/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.