Voice telephony begins the wholesale change to IP in the USA

Thankfully we've moved past this in Europe. A payphone, while on some in travels, in India, 2008

"On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to take its first major step toward letting AT&T and other carriers replace the country's traditional phone system with one that works entirely over Internet Protocol networks.....

.....The type of technology used would be up to the carrier. In rural areas where it's expensive to wire up every home, carriers might try to shift everyone to wireless service. AT&T has said that in 25 percent of its customer locations, "it's currently not economically feasible to build a competitive IP wireline network," so it would use 4G LTE instead "to offer voice and high-speed IP Internet services."

There will be concerns about reliability of wireless services, particularly during power outages, but the FCC official said Wheeler isn't reflexively for or against wireless as a replacement for the PSTN."

Sounds remarkably similar to the concept being used in Ireland for the National Broadband Plan - wireless in rural areas, and run physical lines to reasonable-distance locations. Having said that, the business I'm involved in is inside the M50 ring of Dublin and can't get faster than 5MB so I'll wait and see how it all plays out.....

From Ars Technica