In what was perhaps the biggest surprise in our polling, IP telephony received the greatest numbers of votes for "most overhyped technology" and for "trend to watch." But perhaps it isn't so inexplicable that a technology that some consider revolutionary would be perceived by others as having been assigned undo importance. IP telephony has had a strange career. The consensus in the early 1990s when the Internet was in its infancy was that IP would never carry voice. But some ingenious Israelis proved the conventional wisdom wrong in 1995 by placing voice calls between sound card-equipped computers in the US and Israel, thus evading exorbitant international calling charges.
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