One of the most interesting outcomes of the COVID-19 crisis has been a huge resurgence of telephone calls. While broadband usage is up 40% or more in some markets, the volumes of traditional voice calls have skyrocketed.

Verizon says it’s now seeing an average of 800 million calls per day, which is double the number of calls made on the last Mother’s Day. Verizon also says the average length of calls has increased by one-third over recent averages. AT&T is seeing similarly increased volumes of cellular calls, which are up 35%. They have also seen the volume of WiFi calls made using home broadband on cellphones double in recent weeks. The carriers said they are handling the volumes of calls well and have only had to make a few network adjustments. I’m quoting these statistics from Cecelia Kang in the New York Times, but I’ve been hearing a few similar stories from my smaller clients as well.

Voice has been on a steady decline for years, particularly with young people who communicate by texting or by the use of apps like WhatsApp. There are plenty of kids who will tell you they rarely use their phone to initiate phone calls. There was a time when my daughter was a teenager that it seemed like torture to expect her to talk on the phone.

But the COVID-19 crisis has turned the way we communicate on its ear. People need to call a lot more as part of working from home. Conversations that were done by walking down the hall now need to be done phone or computer.

I’ve been on a lot of computer meetings and calls in the last few weeks. I happen to have decent broadband, and the quality of Zoom or GoToMeeting works great at my end, but I’ve connected to a lot of people who are struggling with poor quality broadband. A lot of people are connecting into computer meetings by phone out of necessity. The carriers report that the biggest surge in voice traffic is now in the daytime, which has historically been the time when phone traffic from residential neighborhoods was at its lowest. Call volumes now seem to have surged because of remote working.

A lot of the surge of voice traffic likely comes from people reaching out to friends and relatives they can no longer visit. I’ve seen a big increase in solo walkers in my neighborhood who are getting out of the house by taking a walk. The big majority of walkers are now talking as they walk—something that used to be fairly rare.

Most people are surprised to hear that over 40% of homes still have a traditional landline. Many households have ditched landlines completely for cellphones over the last decade. A number of homes with landlines have no choice because they live in areas with poor or no cellular coverage. These households are worried every time they hear something bad about their carrier, like with the recently announced Frontier bankruptcy. While many homes are struggling with poor broadband connections when being forced to stay home, there are millions of homes with no broadband, and for whom the traditional landline is their only connection to the world. Many of these people have commuted to places where cellphones work and where the office has broadband, and being stuck at home with only a landline is a throwback to the days before dial-up.

It’s almost certain that voice volumes won’t stay this high after the end of the crisis. However, voice calling probably also won’t revert quickly to old volumes. I think there are likely to be a lot of people who will continue to work from home. I’ve been hearing from folks who say they’ve never been so productive before and will continue to work at home more when the crisis is over. I know that’s what drove me to work from home years ago.

We’ll probably adopt new habits. Young people who are calling and talking to family now might continue to do so when the crisis is over. People who have reconnected with old friends or began talking to existing friends daily by phone might continue to do so. This will all be made easier if the FCC is successful in finally tamping down the volume of nuisance calls we all get.

For the most part, this is a temporary situation, a throwback to the old days when the family phone was in use for most of each evening. It’s interesting to those of us who grew up in the voice business to see this resurgence.