Over the past 6 years I have been watching the growth of the Internet Based Telephone Industry. With the bursting popularity of Broadband or High Speed Internet like DSL, Cable Modem, or Satellite, telephone service has become a natural addition of applications to run over the Internet.

Many people are not aware that most of the major telephone companies use the Internet to route their long distance calls already and have been for years. They use a protocol called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to offer Voice Over IP (VoIP). This same protocol is available in many of the leading messaging programs like Skype, MSN, AOL, etc ... For many years people have been using this protocol to talk over long distances on their computers using programs called