In my daily wanderings around the Internet I just read a little opinion piece by a young journalist in which he predicted that “plain old telephone service,” or POTS for short, isn’t going to go away any time soon. POTS is, of course, the old switched phone network which VoIP service is rapidly replacing for both business and residential use.

Intrigued by the headline, I read on, and soon discovered that the guy was basing his theory in part on the fact that he had been using a cell phone as his only means of communications. For him POTS was a new discovery! He went on to rave about its stability and security in comparison to wireless communications.

VoIP did get a mention … but just barely. No notice that the U.S. Army, as I’ve recently written, is busily switching over to VoIP. Indeed, gone are the days that any high school hacker could listen in on their neighbor’s VoIP conversations if they were both on the same cable television broadband loop. The new rival technologies used by traditional cable and phone companies are, for the record, secure. At least the U.S. Army thinks so, and who am I to argue with the U.S. Army?

And of course if the security is good enough for the government, I dare say it’s more than good enough for small business VoIP users. For enterprise VoIP users too.

Also getting short shrift is a discussion of the fact that, for the large majority of small office – home office (SOHO), small business, and residential VoIP users the infrastructure to deliver the broadband for VoIP is the precise same infrastructure used to deliver POTS (or, in the case of cable subscribers, the same as used to deliver video service). We’re told that, because the technology used to deliver that broadband is evolving, VoIP isn’t a clear choice.

Now wait a minute. Let’s remember the old mechanical switches that were the backbone of the POTS network. I was actually present when the first computer-based phone switch was unveiled. POTS technology evolved constantly (anyone remember Millie the operator and the old plug boards?) and nobody questioned that, so why question VoIP just because broadband technology is evolving.

Bottom line: POTS may hang on for a bit longer, through inertia, but I think some folk may be surprised at just how soon it is going to go away. Put another way, remember the old American Telephone & Telegraph Company (i.e. AT&T, or Ma Bell)? Well, it’s the new AT&T who last year went to the Federal Communications Commission asking for permission to pull the plug on POTS as the “fall back” communications network in the United States.

Oh, and by the way, the opinion piece appeared on what’s now just a web site called Byte. I remember the days when Byte was formidable multi-hundred page magazine, one against which I occasionally competed. Back then the gurus thought it could never die. Simply unthinkable. Just as its unthinkable to some that POTS will soon die.

But die it did, in 1998, at the tender young age of just 23. Reincarnation came with a web-only offering, launched in 2011. And just as the once glorious age of print publications have migrated to the Internet, my prediction is that our young guru is going to be stunned at the speed at which telephony similarly migrates to the Net.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this past week announced the winners of its contest to find the best solutions to the endemic problem of robocallers, who these days take advantage of VoIP technology to ignore the law and “Do Not Call” lists. Those who follow this blog will remember that I wrote about the contest when it was announced last November.

Since then it seems things have been hopping. There were more than 800 entries for the FTC to sift through before choosing the winners, who are … ta da … Serdar Danis and Aaron Foss, who share the $50,000 top prize, and Google, which as a large corporation gets a certificate of honor but no money.

The two individuals who won “both focus on intercepting and filtering out illegal prerecorded calls using technology to ‘blacklist’ robocaller phone numbers and ‘whitelist’ numbers associated with acceptable incoming calls,” the FTC explained in its press release announcing the winners (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/04/robocall.shtm )

Google, meanwhile, took honors for a “Crowd-Sourced Call Identification and Suppression” solution designed by Daniel Klein and Dean Jackson. The Google solution, particularly, is hoped to spell an end to the infamous “Rachel from Card Services” robocalling scam. Reportedly, the FCC has been receiving an extraordinary 200,000 complaints per month complaining about that scam.

I think it’s only fair that I note that it is not only scammers who use robocallers. There are some putatively legitimate businesses who also do, but they cross the line with their sales calls and are usually relatively easy to shut down.

The big question that remains, though, is whether the newly minted solutions that won the FTC contest will actually work. And, even if they do, I fear it will be only a matter of time before the scamming community figures out some other nefarious way to circumvent the system.

In the meantime, as I’ve mentioned before, Phone.com subscribers do have a way to block most robocalls, and at no extra cost. One simply uses the menu system that’s a standard feature on every Phone.com service plan, both for business phone and home phone use. If calls all go to a menu, instead of ringing directly to an extension, Rachel and her cohorts are stopped dead in their tracks.

There’s change coming in the VoIP world, change that will potentially affect every VoIP provider and every VoIP user. Driving that prediction is a forthcoming change in the leadership of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), following the announcement last week by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that he is retiring after four years on the job. FCC Commissioner   Robert McDowell has also announced his planned departure from the board. That leaves two of the five seats on the board, including the chairman’s seat, up for grabs.

It’s not clear just what the change will be, although many gurus are predicting that the new FCC board, whoever it consists of, will be taking a hard look at revenue-generating regulations for VoIP, to replace the billions in tax revenue being lost with the slow death of traditional land-line telephony. It should be remembered that, in various places, the tax on a single landline can exceed $10. In general, none of that tax is levied on a VoIP line.

The good news for VoIP users is that, while a reformulated FCC may try to increase taxes, and its regulation of VoIP, the overall cost structure of VoIP phone service is such that the bottom line cost is still going to be a lot less than traditional telephony. In my estimate, the very worst case is that bills will be half of what we once paid for phone service.

And there is also a good argument made for FCC regulation of VoIP and, in general, the Internet. It means that the FCC can mandate quality of service (QoS) levels by the broadband providers that deliver the VoIP services from companies such as Phone.com. Today, as I’ve written many times, broadband providers have no legal requirement to maintain QoS levels for small and medium-size businesses or households (large companies, in contrast, may have QoS guarantees written in to their broadband contracts).

In any case, there’s now intense crystal-ball gazing in the halls of power in Washington as to just whom President Barack Obama will nominate for the soon-to-be open FCC seats. One leader for the chairman’s post is Jessica Rosenworcel, who is already an FCC Commissioner. A group 37 Democratic U.S. Senators have just sent a letter asking President Obama to appoint Rosenworcel to the post. Her appointment would avoid the need for what could be a messy confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate.

But in the other corner is Tom Wheeler, a former representative for the cable TV and wireless industries who raised $246,000 for the 2012 Obama campaign. And then in the third corner there is Mignon Clyburn, who is also an FCC Commissioner and the daughter of Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina. And in the fourth corner … well, there are actually more candidates than there are corners being touted by various political pressure groups in Washington.

Bottom line is that advise all my fellow small business phone users to keep an eye on the situation, and if you have strong feelings about what’s happening don’t be shy in letting your elected representatives, all the way up to the President, know how you feel.

According to leaks out of the FCC (hardly a surprise), there is some serious back-room discussion of allowing VoIP providers to directly tap into the national telephone numbers pool. The way things stand today, the numbers are still controlled by legacy “telephone companies” … i.e. local exchange carriers including AT&T, Verizon, Century Link, and well over a hundred smaller players. VoIP carriers have to get the numbers from those companies.

The leaks, first reported by web site Politico, hint that the FCC is considering a rule-making action that will change all that.

The obvious question is what does that have to do with the average VoIP user, what difference does it make to me? Well, for those whose phone service is provided by Phone.com or any other VoIP carrier, the difference may be great.

That’s because in this day and age we have something called a “virtual phone number.” In other words, in VoIP technology, the number is not physically tied to switchboard and locality. You can live in California and have a New York phone number, or one from London, or most other places. But the truth is, the number is really tied to a physical location – one still owned by the legacy phone companies. That’s what area codes are (or at least used to be) all about.

But if those legacy phone companies – middlemen, if you will – are cut out of the picture, then a layer of complexity in the network is removed. It doesn’t take a Geek to figure out that the less complex, the better the VoIP phone service can become.

“Allowing VoIP providers to obtain telephone numbers directly, and not through intermediate providers, as is generally the case today, has the potential to fuel innovation and promote competition, at the same time we ensure calls are routed reliably and efficiently, protect public safety, and guard against exhaust of limited numbers,” Politico said that it source, an FCC official, wrote in an email.

One small detail, of course, is that area codes become even less meaningful than they are today. An obvious result is that long distance charges simply don’t have any reality any more. Of course Phone.com users on any plan don’t pay for long distance anywhere in the U.S., but legacy carriers by and large still do try to exact a toll, if only an add-on fee for “unlimited long distance.”

At this point there’s no indication of exactly when the FCC might act, and of course it should be remembered that there’s some pretty heavy lobbying by the powerful local exchange carriers against changing the rules.