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The days of cradling a desk phone between your head and shoulder on a long conference call are over for KPMG LLP’s Canadian employees.

The accounting and advisory firm has deactivated desk phones for all of its approximately 5,000 employees, who now have to make voice calls with an app on their laptops connected to headsets or puck-sized speakers.

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“You couldn’t find a phone if you looked for it,” Greater Toronto Area managing partner Sebastian Distefano said of KPMG’s telecom transformation, which the company first introduced at its new Vaughn office last fall and then rolled out nationwide during the past 10 months.

The move by one of Canada’s largest accounting firms to ditch desk phones and rely on broadband connections for workplace communications reflects what’s going on in homes across the country.

Cutting lines

Consumers are cutting landlines and relying solely on cellphones rather than paying for both, with the telecom regulator announcing plans last year to move subsidies to broadband from landlines as people demand more and faster fixed and mobile data. Now businesses are catching up.