By 2010, 30 percent of U.S. homes will use only cellular or Internet telephony.

Is this all good? People will move to the cheap and free calling VoIP provides, but they may be losing functionality. After all, plain old telephone service (POTS) is extremely reliable, but cellular telephony calls in the U.S. still suffer from variable quality and sudden disconnection, don't they? In a local power outage, POTS works because the line drives the equipment, but consumer-grade VoIP equipment needs mains power to operate.

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All this is about making communication more efficient, and by doing so, making it more broadly available and providing a richer experience. With regard to VoIP services, they are indeed a best-effort type of service today, because quality is still uneven, services such as emergency response are not yet integral and things like uninterrupted power are required to ensure they work. Rather than viewing options completely as transitional substitutes for each other, it's better to look at them as long-term migrations of technology platforms and, in the interim, as a set of capabilities that offer consumers more choice in terms of flexibility and pricing, rather than one-for-one tradeoffs.

In the past, POTS needed to be reliable because that was the only channel for communicating. Now, we have cellular, VoIP, e-mail, v-mail, IM, SMS, MMS and (soon) video. Users have many alternative channels, and each one offers a different set of capabilities with tradeoffs. For example, cellular offers mobility but variable quality and high price, and e-mail offers store-and-forward capabilities for non-real-time communications. So this is not about good or bad - this about different choices for different users based on making tradeoffs according to what's most important to them.

Your prediction implies the substitution of wireless and VoIP over copper telephone lines, but where does optical fiber come into the equation?

Optical to the home is starting to accelerate, which will provide broadband services; VoIP is delivered on these broadband services. So, we expect the service providers that are doing fiber to the home to offer up VoIP services (most already do) over the optical broadband services.

Optical fiber is a choice for various carriers. But if all they are going to do is provide voice services, it's overkill. To ensure they get proper return for their investment, carriers must secure customers for more-advanced services such as video. Where this can be justified, fiber can be used over copper. But we must always remember that copper is in the ground, a sunk investment, and where it can be made to perform better, those who own copper will try to do so.

Why would subscribers actively abandon the old POTS service? Won't competition force the old telephone operators to keep reducing its price until it's almost free, even if it is only a backup?

Actually, from a cost to the service provider perspective, POTS has become more expensive to provide than VoIP services, so it will not go to free (although, in some cases, VoIP services are offered free, like Skype, if you have a broadband service). The important thing to remember is that the provider that is offering you POTS is or will be offering you VoIP, too. Cellular offers the mobility component that wired solutions really can't.

They may do so over time. We have seen users employ wireless first and foremost for the convenience of having outsiders call you wherever you are. With POTS service, you have no mobility. POTS service does not really integrate voice and data, and it doesn't treat voice as an application. So, if all you want is voice quality, you will probably use POTS for some time to come. But as users demand other capabilities, they will combine POTS with other choices. That said, new users often choose wireless over POTS because of its personalization attributes: It's wherever you are. And in many societies, it's the only economic choice.

If we assume that this initial 30 percent will cluster in the major cities, does that mean the other 70 percent will also yield after this tipping point is reached? Or perhaps there will be a sustainable POTS business outside the cities for another two decades.

This is just for the U.S., of course. And it speaks to new lines installed. The other 70 percent will have existing systems for quality. A portion of these new users will be teens, and as they go forward in life, they will expect that wireless is foundational to the way they work.

There will be POTS services in rural areas for many years. There still are a few rotary dial phones out there today.

I don't believe it will happen that fast, but it will happen. Low power VOIP devices should be able to survive power outages through batteries. I also think current mobile networks will join POTS and be replaced by wireless VOIP.

Telecom service ubiquity is dead -- long live service coexistence. My point: there are people that still use ISDN in markets were DSL is availbale. I recall when Gartner (and others) predicted that ISDN would be ubiquitous. In hindsight, that prediction seems very funny now. The reality: telcos are marketing-challenged, and so they often rely on early-adopters to seed the marketplace. As a resulet, many new services never reach mainstream consumers.