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More than half a million Canadians hung up their home phones permanently in the past fiscal year, and the cord-cutting trend seems to be accelerating despite incentives offered by telecoms to keep customers on the line.

As many as 540,000 subscribers cancelled their home phone services from the top five telecommunications providers – Bell, Rogers Communications Inc., Shaw Communications Inc., Telus Corp. and Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. – between the first quarters of 2015 and 2016, with about 160,000 cutting their landlines in the past quarter alone, according to the companies’ quarterly reports.

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That’s the equivalent of the entire province of Manitoba (plus a few thousand neighbours in Saskatchewan) giving up their landlines last year if each subscriber represents one household. The drop pushes the percentage of Canadian households that rely solely on mobile phones well above 25 per cent, higher than Statistics Canada’s most recent rate of 23.7 per cent based on 2014 data.