Everybody is having a rush of blood at the prospect of replacing their old fashioned expensive to use (line rentals and call charges are a killer) plain old telephones, with sleek new cheaper VoIP systems. However, Cisco Australia managing director, Ross Fowler, says it just isn't going to happen anytime soon.

"The PSTN (public switched telephone network) is going to be around for quite a few years yet," says Fowler. "I first came across IP telephony back in the mid-90s and people were saying then that the PSTN was going to be dead in two to three years. Here we are 10 years later and it's still very much alive. There's a huge investment in it and what will happen is that there will be a movement from the corporate communications space into the SMB area and eventually into the consumer market."

Although Fowler believes the plain old telephone will still remain in the marketplace, it will gradually get swamped by competition from other voice delivery services and technologies. "The PSTN will be just one of the ways of delivering voice calls," he says. "There will be many other ways, using other networks based on IP carrying voice traffic."

While residential customers still want to hang on to their old expensive phone system, however, it's a different story in the corporate world, according to Fowler.

"In the corporate world, they have made the decision to go to IP telephony already," says Fowler. "When I joined Cisco in October 2003, we had shipped something like 50,000 IP telephony handsets to the Australian market. We have now delivered 170,000 handsets to over 500 customers, so it's grown very rapidly."

Fowler is probably right. Nothing beats the plain old copper line telephone for reliability and continuous uptime, as we discovered recently during a power blackout. Then again, my mobile phone also worked during the black out.