The end of the line

摘要

It was the industry's bread and butter for over a century. But the end is now in sight for traditional telephone service, which will soon be overtaken by voice-over-internet calls in terms of usage, and displaced by broadband internet access as the core revenue-earning service offered over fixed lines by telecoms firms. And even if the traditional telephone is not quite dead yet, its business model certainly is: metered telephone calls whose cost depends on the length of the call and the distance covered are becoming an anachronism.