When will the (traditional) telephone hang up?

The very idea of what is a phone call is changing, and changing fast. What used to be a fixed phone turned into anywhere calling. Now Facebook, Google and Skype have made calls about video chat, friends and social circles, not phone numbers. It’s perhaps time to rethink the very notion of a phone call and what defines the classic phone network.

Tom Evslin, who has spent his entire life in telecom and data services industries, believes it’s time for Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to come to grips with the reality that people are choosing cellular or Internet voice over traditional phone systems. He points to a recent report from the National Center for Health Statistics that notes that by 2018, only 6 percent of the U.S. population will be using the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which to non-telecom geeks means: your home phone from the phone company. Evslin, who is on the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) for the FCC, notes in a blog post that “without continued government support, the PSTN would probably disappear before 2018 since the carriers’ cost to maintain the many miles of copper and the rest of the system doesn't go down nearly as quickly as revenue from subscribers declines.”