Will the VoIP services to the consumer, as proposed by Qwest and SBC, require the consumer to purchase special VoIP telephones? Will the consumer need to be re-educated with regard to the traditional sounds associated with "dial tone" and "rings?"
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More than likely, it will require either new phones or some type of interface at the customer premise to reassemble the data packets into a voice call. Unfortunately, the details are a bit sketchy as to their particular implementation (quite understandably) so it is hard to say. They will probably roll out a package that includes the equipment, similar to the way they do with DSL, etc.
As for dial-tones and rings, I don't think you will see that changing. The neat thing about many of these implementations is that they are invisible to the end user. As for as the end-user is concerned, it is just like using a regular telephone and most of the complexity is handled in the switch. Now, on the other hand, if they use SIP in their implementation, the user could actually dial a phone number by email address or URL. That would add a "re-education" or actually a continuing education factor, as the phones could work either way.
This was first published in December 2003