ecting to the Vonage network. One is to use a small terminal adapter that Vonage will mail to you; it is connected to the broadband network, and a phone and laptop are in turn plugged Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telephony Telephony into the box. Alternatively, subscribers can download a SoftPhone and make calls from their laptop. I have been a Vonage user for quite some time and the service could not be easier to use. When I travel I simply plug my laptop into the broadband connection in my hotel room. The Vonage SoftPhone auto- matically boots up when I start the machine, and as soon as it's online I can start making (and more importantly, receiving) telephone calls. Think about it: I can be in a hotel room in Mumbai and if someone dials my Vermont-based Vonage telephone number, the phone will ring in India -and the caller has no idea where I am, nor do they need to. Users beware: Be sure to shut down your laptop when traveling internationally, because the phone will inevitably ring at 3:30 AM because the caller doesn't realize you're traveling abroad! Vonage offers remarkable service for a remarkably low price, and most of the time it is indistinguishable from traditional circuit-switched voice. Their service is so good that other companies have come into the mar- ketplace, including AT&T (CallVantage), and Verizon (VoiceWing). The number of players grows daily. To date Vonage has approximately 250,000 customers. Let's now turn our attention to another purveyor of VoIP, which has a few more- roughly 20 million subscribers. Skype I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype. When the inventors of KaZaA are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic, and it's free-it's over. The world will change now inevitably. -Michael Powell, Chairman, FCC The idea of cha