Cellphone-Only households range from 5 to 38 per cent across the USA

[tmcnet] Arbitron claims that the company has compiled population estimates for cell-phone-only “CPO” households for the first time down to the local markets. The report by the company indicates that the CPO rate vary considerably in different areas.

Over the last few years, there has been a tendency among customers to get rid of landline phones. Companies like AT&T noticed this shift some years ago and responded by introducing more wireless plans tailored to CPO customers. The younger generation likes to use only the cell phones and the recession has forced many mid age group customers to abandon their wired phones in favor of cell phones. Even the service providers are pushing their mobile services more aggressively than the wired phone services.

According to Arbitron, CPO penetration rates vary from as high as 38 percent in Bryan-College Station, Texas to as low as 5 percent in Hamptons-Riverhead. According to the report, there is a huge variation by region and market characteristics such as percent of the urban/suburban/rural population and age and ethnic distribution of the market population.

“We believe Arbitron is the first market researcher to track market-level cell-phone-only penetration," said Bob Henrick, Executive Vice President Customer Solutions at Arbitron. "We use the county-level CPO penetration results from our sampling operations as a building block to produce metro-level CPO penetration estimates.”

To facilitate measurement of people who have "cut the cord" and cannot be reached by landline, Arbitron introduced CPO sampling in 151 diary markets with its Spring 2009 survey. The estimates in the CPO penetration are based on more than 154,000 surveys that Arbitron has received from households in 151 diary markets.

The company recently announced commercialized its Portable People Meter radio ratings service in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood, Florida market and is releasing radio audience estimates for the June 2009 PPM survey month to its subscribers in Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood. The PPM detects inaudible codes embedded in the audio portion of media and entertainment content delivered by broadcasters, content providers and distributors.

Arbitron Releases a New Survey on Cell-Phone-Only Households