However, in recent years, more Malaysians are opting to use handphones. Statistics by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) revealed that there are currently more than 12 million handphone users in the country. That's almost half of Malaysia's population.

A handphone user survey conducted by the MCMC revealed that half of those with fixed line phones at home prefer to use their handphones, even when the fixed-line phones were not in use. The survey suggested that it could be due to the narrowing gap between the tariffs or a more affluent society or both.

This trend is not only exclusive to Malaysia. Throughout the world, mobiles are outdoing landlines with cheaper and more flexible packages and a host of conveniences common fixed line phones lack such as the Short Message Service (SMS) capability.

According to a BBC news report, India's mobile telephone sector expanded to 79.4 million customers at the end of May, which represented a 39% annual growth.

Mobile telephone costs in India have dropped to as low as one cent a minute - one of the world's lowest rates, it said. Some 1.5 million Indian people are signing up to mobile phone services every month and the demand has led to the influx of a number of companies into the country.

The report quoted Indian authorities as saying that the number of mobile phones is expected to exceed landline phones by the end of 2004.

According to an annual industry report by the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU), there will be 1.5 billion mobile phones subscribers compared with 1.2 billion fixed-line customers around the world by the middle of 2004.

There is a definite inclination towards the trend in Malaysia as statistics compiled by the MCMC revealed that the number of fixed-line residential subscribers has already dwindled from 3.4 million in 2001 to 3.14 million as of September this year.

A report by telecommunications research firm Analysys described the most attractive but challenging prospect for mobile operators is to encourage users to give up their fixed voice services altogether. However, it said that fixed lines will still be needed to support internet access and will thus limit the decline in fixed voice channels between 2004 to 2006 to one per cent.

But with alternative means of connecting to the Internet, the decline in fixed voice channels might just accelerate to almost 10 per cent a year from 2006 to 2009, it said, speeding up the migration of voice traffic from fixed to mobile.