Interesting piece in the Financial Times today speculating on whether voice over IP is about to come of age, for the domestic as well as the business customer. Briefly, VoIP attaches your phone to your Internet connection rather than your phone line so you don't have to pay for two connections at the same time.
A number of things have to happen for this to become realistic - for example you have to have a connection that goes like stink, although this is likely to happen soon, said the Guardian yesterday.
The only difficulty I can see is that the technology doesn't yet work by letting you pick up your phone and hear a dialling tone - you have to enter commands and stuff for the moment. Once this obstacle has gone away I could see it becoming big - except aren't the telecom companies bound to object to all of their revenue falling away, and find a way of charging extra for Internet connections?
