This story is one of those too-good-to-be-true tales that actually might be real. The acronym VoIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol; that’s the technology for making telephone calls over the web. Several companies have introduced services that utilize this technological capacity and they are making a commercial success of it. That’s why major cable operators are now “bundling” cable service, high speed Internet access and telephone service in a package. They can provide all three products over the single coaxial cable wire that comes through your wall at home.
Telephone service over cable blows right past the “level playing field” that antitrust decisions have sought to achieve in order to provide competition for phone service on a local level. The telephone companies’ switching systems and all those copper cables on all those poles have been totally subverted by another Internet service. In the words of Peter Sisson, a former Bell Labs researcher, “Telephone service used to be based on a huge infrastructure of high-priced equipment…and now it’s just software.”
VoIP is technology that...