After the dot-com crash, using VoIP became a cool thing to do. Surviving service providers, whose mainstay businesses also included traditional calling services, offered VoIP for a fee, albeit at negligible prices. This meant, and still means, that with a laptop, a handset or headset and broadband Internet access, it became possible to call anyplace in the world at a ridiculously low cost. A phone call from California to your girlfriend in Hong Kong? Five cents a minute. Another girlfriend in Sweden who dumped you and is no longer responding to your emails, but whom you are desperately trying to win back? Four cents a minute. Your bookmaker in New Jersey? Two cents a minute.

During the past four years or so, VoIP technologies have gotten better as well, both on a headset level and on a system level, so that that VoIP voice quality has gradually approached that of traditional telephones. It became possible to make phone calls wherever there was broadband Internet access - dial-up still doesn't work well. This also allowed phone calls to be made where there was no cellular phone access (try making a cell phone call in Vermont where hippy legislation put a pox on cellular phone antennas).

With the advent of 802.11 Wi-Fi hotspots, you could call anywhere with your PC while sitting in a coffee shop or waiting for the bus. For real geek fun, you could make phone calls from your laptop while war driving, and hopping on a free signal. Before most users in New York City began turning on their WEPs to encrypt their signals - many still haven't - you could sit on a bus and make phone calls with your laptop.

However, despite vendor claims, VoIP and traditional telephone parity in quality overall has not been reached. Over the past few years it has gotten much better, though, and in some cases, such as when high level systems and direct IP connections between networks are established, the quality of VoIP compared to traditional telephones lines can even be better.