Is Traditional Landline Telephone Service Even Worth Saving?

The failure of SunRocket–which I write about here–has left a fair number of people without landline telephone service. Nothing bad seems to have happened as a result. In countries like Israel and Greece that had terrible government-run phone monopolies, few people under 40 even have landlines at home largely because the monopolies gave the service such a bad reputation. The current billing structure for mobile service make it unattractive for businesses to adopt mobile telephone service for many purposes. The relative lack of density of North American mobile phone networks, furthermore, means that dropped calls are a fact of life. But network quality already seems to be improving by leaps and bounds (it’s already much better in the richer and denser parts of Asia and Europe) and there’s probably some economic model that would let mobile phone technologies work for business too. Voice Over IP is also a viable alternative for call centers and other “incoming only” businesses. Paired with WiFi, of course, VOIP can also work as a mobile technology.
In the long run, is there any reason why we’ll keep on sending telephone calls across copper cable? Or even have landlines at all? Any thoughts?