I had the dubious privilege of being at Voice Over Net 200 in San Jose,
where 80% of the participants were all getting excited about VoIP
blowing out the PSTN. Indeed, readers of pulver.com at that time might
have concluded that it was time to hire a skip to haul away all that
redundant equipment. Maybe things would have been different without
the tripple whammy of the dot.com flop, collapse in bandwidth prices
and 3G fresh-air auctions, but it seems to me that VoIP's "hype vs.
reality" curve is going to have a second anticipated but unfulfilled
forecast spike. I'm afraid it still looks like we'll get carrier-grade
VoIP only when BT and the cable companies churn their rusting,
collapsing narrowband switches for softswitches in about 2010.