The Future of Phone Companies Shipping bits will be a crummy business. Transporting voice will be even worse. By 2020, there will be so many broadband paths into and out of your home that competition will render bandwidth a commodity of the worst kind, with no margins and no real basis for charging anything. Each channel will have so much spare capacity that measuring available bandwidth will make as much sense as counting photons passing through a window.
Scarcity creates value.
POTS, plain old telephone service, is better served and more inexpensively installed and maintained using fiber. Japan will have it in every home by 2015. There will be such a glut of bit-transportation capacity that vendors will be giving it away to get you to buy something or just to look at advertising. And we will soon be exchanging bits among ourselves that represent almost anything but real-time voice traffic. Voiceless telephony Today, the telephone companies take the phone in their name far too seriously.