While many will decry the attempts of the incumbent carriers to force VoIP into the straitjacket of PSTN thinking, and while there will always be a niche for services like Skype and Free World Dialup, here are the reasons why consumers and businesses alike will continue to pay for phone companies to exist:

• It costs money to interconnect with the public switched telephone network, and the PSTN is not going to go away for the foreseeable future.

• Real-time services such as voice and video need Quality of Service. With the possible exception of Skype, which has its own proprietary, sophisticated techniques for finding the best path for a call, trusting to the Internet will typically not result in the best experience. That’s why PSTN replacement services get calls off the Internet and onto their own backbones as close to the subscriber as possible. These private backbones, with their call servers, traffic engineering and security infrastructure, cost money to build and run.

• The phone company provides a minimum guarantee that the identity of the person calling you is verified, assuming that there’s a web of trust between the various service providers handing off calls to each other, and that subscribers are adequately authenticated by their service providers. Otherwise, we’d be deluged by VoIP scammers and spammers, which is one big reason we don’t want voice to be just another application riding on the Internet, like email.

• The government wants to be able to tax you and eavesdrop on your calls, and the phone companies are convenient conduits for doing so.

• There is a reasonable requirement to ensure subscribers can connect to police, fire and ambulance services in the event of an emergency, and the infrastructure involved costs money to put in place and run.

• The folks who own and control the pipes definitely do want to be paid for the value of the services carried over them, not just for the raw bits transported. While this is at the heart of the network neutrality debate, there are hooks being put into SIP as part of the IMS standardization process to allow this to happen. I don’t say that this is good or bad, but there are many millions of dollars being spent on lobbying and technical development to allow this to happen.

And, Joe Schmoe, there is plenty of activity by both established companies and startups in providing VoIP security. A good place to start would be to look at the VoIP Security Alliance web site. One particular category of product to look at in particular is the Session Border Controller, which has a key role in managing and securing VoIP, video and instant messaging traffic.

Disclaimer: I work for a startup that makes Session Border Controllers, Covergence, Inc. of Maynard, Mass. We sell our products to both phone companies and enterprises.

Many vendors here (http://www.avm.de/de/Produkte/FRITZBox/FRITZ_Fon/index.html) and there (http://www.inventel.com/) are doing that as well