Well, I think it was only a matter of time before we saw these services take off. We use VoIP here at my job, & the things have run smoothly but for a few bumps here & there. It's an entirely new infrastructure, though, & I can certainly see some of the phone company employees receiving tasty job offerings from ISPs in the not-so-distant future...

"The long-distance giant announced Thursday that it expects to have a service delivering voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) available to consumers in the top 100 markets by the first quarter of 2004."