VoIP or Internet Phone is great alternative to traditional phone service. It's here to stay and it's predicated to eventually be the defacto standard for telephone standard. Traditional phone service uses nailed up connections. When you call your Aunt on the other side of the country using your regular service a path from point A to point B is put up and left up for the duration of the call. When you think about a voice conversation there a many pauses and quiet time periods. In those quiet periods, there's space for millions of data bits. That means that nailed up connection is very inefficient, so it's expensive. It's like building a road that only you use from point A to point B! When you compare that to VoIP or Internet Phone, your conversation is converted to data packets and put on the internet where the connection is shared. You can think of it as your conversation is put in a car and put on a highway with many other cars and exits the highway at the right exit for your Aunt. VoIP still has some growing pains, but is getting better everyday.