My world got smaller, my business grew five times over, and I got talking

I'm a web designer and I work wacky hours, push buttons on a computer, talk to a lot of people, send out email, drink coffee, like the Discovery Channel and enjoy running my own business. My business consists of working with people, helping businesses out, generating ideas, communicating with others, creating reports, talking to people. Sometime I talk about business, sometimes about the internet and sometimes I talk about nothing. If you catch me in an espresso moment, you'll probably want to stop talking to me after a while.

My business has clients that are everywhere in the world. My clients need me at all hours at times, hence the cappuccino moments. My clients want things done yesterday. My clients like good work, good communication, and good results. My clients can be demanding, abrasive or reactive. I put out fires to keep my clients happy, its part of my business. Sometimes my clients can't wait for me to call and sometimes I can't wait to not talk to them at all. My business relies on me being in touch with my clients. These days, who do you know that does not need to be in touch with someone out there?

At the end of the day, I need to keep in touch with my business customers, because if I don't, I won't see any steak or cake next month.

I have a cell phone, a computer, a scanner, a printer, a telephone, a pda, a new iPod, a digital camera, some speakers, headphones, a wireless mouse and various other gadgets to keep my life simple and keep my business running smoothly. Little did I know that there is this something new out there called VOIP. Voice over Internet Protocol. Sounds high tech huh?

With all the phones, cell phones, internet phones, pagers and everything that is out there to communicate with, why would I now need VOIP?

Do I really need another device on top of another device? Do I really need to figure out how to use another gadget? Do I need to download more software to my computer? What all do I have to buy now? I pride myself in being up to date and with the times and on top of all that is new out there, but this thing surprised me, because it's been out there already for a while. The more I looked in to it, the more I found there to be people subscribing to this technology of getting free, or shall we call it, unlimited long distance. I'll explain more about the technical parts of the technology a bit later.

Here's my most recent scenario of why I chose to even consider VOIP.

I recently moved to a community where for some reason I am out of the local calling area for the district that I live in. That's not exciting when all my clients live in the city and now it costs me money to make a simple phone call. Long distance during the day is not cheap yet. So I decided to look at my options.

Do I use my cell phone and make long distance calls? If I did that, I run the risk of using up my valuable daytime minutes. It turns out, long distance on some cell phone plans are almost double the rate the normal landline rates. I can just see my bills now running close to a thousand a month.

Second option was email to stay in touch with everyone. Email is great, but when you need that answer right away or a simple yes or no, somehow it just did not work out for me. I'd heard the common feedback, "Sorry, I was away from the computer", "My computer has a virus", "What email?