“People in Africa turned paid telephone minutes into an ad hoc, grassroots e-currency…There are already reasons why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use cheap telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways to use connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.” —Howard Rheingold, Internet sociologist and author of Virtual Community and Smart Mobs

“By 2020, the network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been disintermediated. We’ll have standard network connections around the world…Billions of people will have joined the Internet who don’t speak English. They won’t think of these things as ‘phones' either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.” —Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member

“Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor populations, and the next 5 years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal, and federal governments, handset makers, and content creators. I don’t know who will win.” —danah boyd, Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society

“Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era—like transistor radios are today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard communications chip on many devices. We’ll probably carry some kind of screen-based reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to communicate verbally, we’ll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.” —Josh Quittner, executive editor of Fortune magazine; longtime technology journalist and editor

“I agree, but I don’t see this as entirely positive, as it perpetuates ‘soundbite’ dissemination and thinking and the continuing move toward shorter attention spans and dumbing down of content.” —Anonymous respondent