omewhat off-the-wall companies to really push it to the front of the public consciousness. The first of these was Vonage; the second was Skype. Vonage Vonage, "The Broadband Phone Company," was founded in January 2001 in Edison, New Jersey. With 600 employees, Vonage com- pletes more than five million calls per week and has more than 350,000 active lines in service. To date they have completed more than 200 mil- lion calls over their network, which is Internet-based VoIP. Signing up for the service could not be easier, because it is all done at the Vonage Web site-there is no need for "a human in the loop." Would- be customers can read all about the service, get answers to their ques- tions, and if they decide they want to sign up they give Vonage a credit card via a secure connection; the card is billed each month for the service. They then enter their area code (NPA), after which Vonage assigns them a phone number. It is important to note that the number is virtual-i.e., while I live in Vermont, I don't have to have a Vermont area code (there's only one for the entire state). For example, a good friend of mine lives in New Jersey but his parents live in southern California. To prevent them having to pay long-distance charges when they call him, he has an LA area code. I have even heard about professional people asking for a 212 area code SO that they would appear as if they were in New York City for prestige reasons! Once the phone number has been assigned, users can then select a wide variety of supplementary services (caller ID, etc.) at no extra charge. One thing they have to do is configure their voice mail service, which is included as part of the low-cost package. There are two options; one is the traditional model, where a subscriber dials an access number, enters a PIN code and then listens to their messages. Alternatively, sub- scribers can set it up (all done at the Web site) so that received voice mail messages are converted to .wav files and sent as e-mail attachments! There are two options for conn