Preface

You never have to pay another long distance phone bill again, thanks to the revolution of making voice calls over the Internet. Let me show you how we reached this wonderful point in long distance communications.

First consider the lowly home telephone. Over the past 100 and more years, it rang with excitement, marked progress for rural communities, and then gradually became that dull thing upstaged by cell phones and Instant Messaging.

Switch to an Internet phone service provider and your telephone life will once again buzz with promise, fun, and new features. Best of all, you get all this for less money than ever before, and almost certainly less than you're paying now.

Switch to save money. Switch to get new features. Switch to connect to a world-wide community of like-minded people. Switch for any of these reasons, for all three reasons, or for some completely different reason.

Internet phone service became possible when broadband Internet access reached a critical number of residences and small businesses (this is why Internet phone service is often called broadband phone service). Big companies switched from their traditional telephone service to Internet Telephony (another name for broadband phone service) using the data networks they built to connect their computers. Their long distance charges tumbled down lower than any other time in the history of big business.

Today, only stupid companies pay high long distance charges. Smart consumers like you (you're looking at this book so you must be smart) can follow their lead and never pay for another long distance call.

Let me repeat: many of you will never have to pay for a long distance call again if you follow the suggestions in this book.

Saving money isn't the only reason to switch to a broadband phone service provider, but that reason pushed most of the early adopters. Since they paved the way, you can follow and move your traditional telephone service to one of hundreds of broadband phone service providers and start saving money and controlling your voice communications the way you want.

For the first time in history, you can control your telephone service. Better yet, you'll save money while getting more features.