Sure; and everyone has a serial port, floppy disks and CRT monitors.

For anything to replace email, it will need to be decentralised. No company will trust facebook, twitter, google or anybody else with their private corporate data. It will also need to be obviously superior to email in almost every way. It needs to add features that people want.

The only serious contender for replacing email is Wave. I've been using it for the past 2-3 days and even as a beta I'm already preferring it over email. I'm honestly wishing everyone I need to talk to had a wave account already. Email will be around for at least 15 years. But I don't think it'll be around forever.

I could be wrong, but it would be prudent not to dismiss wave out of hand just yet.

To be fair, Wave is being developed as an open standard. Google is opening the protocol. They will also maintain an open source reference implementation for anyone to deploy in their own corner of the 'net.

I'm sure you mean well, but thats just FUD. How much bandwidth do you actually use? I very much doubt its anywhere near 250GB per month.

With a 250GB / month cap flash websites, windows updates and the once-a-month wow patch will not chew up your bandwidth. Those things will barely be noticeable.

250GB/month is around 8GB per day. Flash-based websites are usually no bigger than a meg or two. With 8GB per day you could download a fresh copy of windows vista every day, a 1GB world of warcraft patch and still have enough bandwidth left over for hundreds of flash-based websites.

250GB is a nutjob amount of bandwidth.

Even if you are a rabid torrenter, 8GB per day lets you download about 6 hours of video every day in HD.

As others have mentioned, your electricity is already metered and the world has not crumbled. Hard disks cost money and the world has not crumbled. Why? Because the prices are reasonable.

I share a 140GB internet connection with 5 other geeks and we manage just fine. We could pay more for more bandwidth if we wanted. But, we don't need to. Do we use the internet less because bandwidth costs money? Not really. I mean; who would want to download a new copy of windows vista every day?