Technology experts say the arrival of 4G high-speed mobile broadband will kill off the humble home telephone landline in the UK within five years.

Following this week's announcement that mobile-phone provider Everything Everywhere – owner of the Orange and T-Mobile brands – is to launch the country's first 4G network, leading technologists have told the Sunday Herald that landline telephones will cease to be a feature of Scottish homes before the end of the decade.

They believe that the accelerated broadband service, capable of delivering faster download speeds than many existing wired connections, marks the end of the line for a device already widely considered obsolete by those in the communications sector.

Peter Cochrane, former chief technologist at BT, said: "The advent of 4G networks is a significant turning point, introducing the British public to an era of highly flexible, rapid and feature-rich mobile telecommunications that will ultimately result in the home telephone becoming extinct. Nobody under 24 today would consider it either necessary or practical to have a phone installed in their home, and as a concept it will certainly cease to exist within the next five or 10 years."

Cochrane, a high-flying academic and engineer who led research into a range of wireless and mobile technologies at BT's experimental laboratories in the 1990s, points out that since the introduction of 4G networks in 2010 in America, the US population's reliance on home telephones has steadily fallen, while in Finland less than 40% of homes now have a traditional fixed-line connection.

He said: "It is remarkable that something that has been a central feature of domestic life should have reached the end of its useful life so quickly, but whenever mobile broadband has been introduced elsewhere in the world, it has been logically and swiftly followed by a marked decline in the use of home phones."

Mobile giant EE said it will introduce 4G to 16 British cities, including Glasgow and Edinburgh, over the next few months. In tests, the service has delivered download speeds of up to 40Mbps, five times faster than existing 3G connections and considerably outstripping the 9Mbps enjoyed by the average UK broadband customer.

Although pricing plans for the service have yet to be revealed, many commentators believe that with four more companies set to introduce 4G networks in 2013, the widespread availability will inevitably encourage consumers to abandon home telephones altogether.

Jason Jennings, editor of technology website CNet, said: "The reality is that fixed phones are already obsolete. The only reason anybody still has a landline installed today is because the major service providers insist on bundling them with broadband connections in order to wring an extra £15 a month out of their customers, but increasingly those telephones are rarely if ever used.

"There is growing pressure on the regulators to take a closer look at this practice and when they finally introduce rules to stop compulsory subscriptions, the market for fixed-line telephones will evaporate virtually overnight."

BT Group said it has installed almost 100,000 new lines for clients over the last year as a consequence of demand for fibre-based broadband, and said that with 25 million connections currently in service the landline is far from dead.

However, Ofcom's most recent report on the matter stated that one in seven UK households are already mobile-only.

Chris Gabriel, VP of Solutions Management at international IT group Logicalis, said: "4G is yet another nail in the coffin of wired connections, and those having children today may well be giving birth to kids who will never plug anything into anything else."