N2Phone is one of the many service providers that offer VoIP telephony that only requires a PC-connected headset, broadband access and a credit card to work.

VoIP (voice-over IP) is no longer about just making one-cent-a-minute phone calls from your PC. Recent enterprise adoption is making VoIP as commonplace as traditional plain old-fashioned telephony, with the addition of added features that can be bundled with data network applications. This means big business for OEMs, networking consultants and resellers.

This year, enterprises have finally begun integrating VoIP into their data network infrastructures on a large scale after several false starts. The benefits for enterprises? The ability to make phone calls, get voice mail or other functions anywhere your Internet-enabled PC goes, along with added advantages of bundling voice and data applications. For network administration, systems from OEM heavy hitters such as 3Com, Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, Nortel and Siemens enable the integration of voice management with enterprise LANs, thus eliminating the split between telephone and data server networks.

VoIP is also dirt-cheap when it comes to long distance phone rates for both domestic and international calls. Indeed, using VoIP in the past to make cheap phone calls anywhere with a PC that had broadband Internet access marked the raison d'être for VoIP when it saw a false start during the pre-crash dot-com days.

Then, many service providers offered free or almost-free access to make phone calls over the Internet. However, the problem, besides very spotty voice connections, was that the application never saw wide-scale adoption to sustain VoIP service provider business models. Then, there were far from enough potential customers in the U.S. and Europe, not to mention elsewhere in the world, who had broadband access, which is almost a requisite for making phone calls over the Internet.