Of the many reasons that I’ve had for wanting different mobile devices over the years, one of them was this idea that I could use the data connection of my mobile to be the voice (phone) line. Whether it would be through services such as Skype or other types of VoIP/XMPP services, I continue to see that the future of the phone line is a limited one – given what’s possible via the Internet.

I’m not the only one thinking like this. There are several folks who have gone towards similar lines of thinking with their mobile and tablet devics. For example, there’s a person who wrote recently of using the HSPA Google Nexus 7 as their only mobile device:

…Overall, I’m pretty happy with the using the Nexus 7 as my only mobile device experiment, and will probably stick with it for a while, at least until phone screen sizes start catching up…

Its not just people thinking like this, phone companies are as well. Ars Technica talks about AT&T’s pointing in this direction:

Two months ago, AT&T petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to plan for the retirement of traditional phone networks and transition to what AT&T sees as an inevitability: the all-IP telco.

AT&T had been discussing the transition internally, spurred on by the FCC’s own suggestion that the Public Switched Telephone Network might be ripe for death somewhere around 2018. “This telephone network we’ve grown up with is now an obsolete platform, or at least a rapidly obsolescing platform,” Hank Hultquist, VP of AT&T’s federal regulatory division, said today. “It will not be sustainable for the indefinite future. Nobody’s making this network technology anymore. It’s become more and more difficult to find spare parts for it. And it’s becoming more and more difficult to find trained technicians and engineers to work on it.”

And when you think about it (communication’s taking priority, mobile being a primary interface, etc.) these kinds of moves just make sense.

So, in paying attention to the trends – voice isn’t the primary interface for mobile amongst other items – how does your organization/ministry plan to meet people when the state of communications is hyperconnectivity by default?