Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:20 and sunset is 4:22, for 9 hours, 2 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1835, the second Great Fire of New York destroys 53,000 square meters (13 acres) of New York City’s Financial District.
One could guess that telephone landlines were in decline, but a recent story drives that point home:
AT&T plans to discontinue its traditional landline telephone service in Wisconsin and most states in its service area by the end of 2029.
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The company says only 5 percent of its residential customers still use copper technology and it’s working with them to ensure they do not lose voice or 911 services. The company has introduced a new service that works like a traditional landline, but connects using wireless networks or broadband.
In Wisconsin, roughly 15 percent of households still had a landline as of 2022, while roughly 5.5 percent of adults still primarily used their landline and 3 percent rely entirely on landlines, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The vast majority of households used only wireless telephones in 2022 — 83.7 percent in Wisconsin. That number has come up substantially over the last few decades as advancements in cell phone technology have led to consumers increasingly ditching traditional landline service.
For comparison, about 12.8 percent of American households only had wireless phones in the latter half of 2006, according to federal data.
See Joe Schulz, AT&T to discontinue traditional landline service in Wisconsin by the end of 2029, Wisconsin Public Radio, December 17, 2024.
Rare tornado rips through Northern California town: