10 forgotten wonders of 1980s homes

Completely? I expect that to be a fairly long time - decades, at least. Most of my phone service is VoI (everything but my cell). My opinion: the major upsides are cost and flexibility; the major downsides are (a) the quality and security implications of using the open Internet and (b) additional points of failure, many of which usually don't have anything like three nines of reliability. In my case the cost and flexibility benefits are enhanced because I am the primary geek behind the system my phones connect to - I work for that provider. But even if I had to set up a tiny little PBX and pay normal uplink rates it'd still be cheaper and more flexible than POTS. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B