Why the Web may replace your phone

VoIP. Pronounced "voip," it sounds as silly as it looks. But in the world of telecommunications, it's becoming a serious business that could change the way you make a phone call.

Rather than depending on telephone lines, VoIP - or Voice over Internet Protocol - would allow you to use the Web. It might pave the way for a new, more flexible wireless service. And it's cheap: You could reach Nanjing for the price of calling next door.

It's "probably the most significant paradigm shift in the entire history of modern communications, since the invention of the telephone," Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said earlier this year.

Although the technology has been around for more than a decade, it now looks poised for rapid growth, attracting the biggest players from both the cable TV and conventional phone industries, companies with names like Cox, Time Warner, Verizon, Qwest, and AT&T. In July, aerospace giant Boeing, which has some 157,000 employees and offices in 70 countries, announced it would use VoIP to handle all phone calls within the company.

The rapid move of such big brand names into the market is a validation that VoIP is for real, says Philip Solis, a senior analyst at ABI Research, a technology research think tank in Oyster Bay, N.Y. "This market is starting to heat up."

By 2008, about 17 percent of all phone lines in North America will be VoIP, according to one estimate. Businesses may adopt the technology even faster than consumers. The Radicati Group forecasts that worldwide corporate phone lines using VoIP will jump from 4 percent today to 44 percent in 2008.

The attractions of VoIP are obvious: much lower cost and myriad features that enable users to filter, block, save, and redirect incoming calls. Proponents argue that some of the traditional drawbacks - voice quality, reliability, and the inability of a 911 operator to track a caller's location - are quickly fading.

By weaving VoIP with another hot technology - Wi-Fi - users may soon be carrying it in their pocket or purse in the form of a dual-system handset, a portable phone that would leap seamlessly between cellular and Wi-Fi connections as it chooses the best signal or lowest cost.

Richard Tworek is a believer in VoIP, both at home and at work. For $20 a month ("I'm a cheap guy," he says) he uses a VoIP service to talk by phone for unlimited minutes throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. He often calls his son in the Air Force, who's stationed in Europe. The voice quality is "fantastic," he says, though he concedes he's kept his conventional phone line as a backup.

At work, Mr. Tworek has seen his own Frederick, Md., company, Qovia, grow in 2-1/2 years from a basement startup to one with 65 employees. Looking for a way into the Internet market after its "nuclear winter" a few years back, he began researching VoIP and decided that it was one of those rare new technologies where "the reality was far outstripping the hype."

To call using VoIP, a customer signs up with a carrier and is sent a VoIP gateway or adapter that connects a conventional phone to a broadband Internet connection. The phone call is carried as packets of data over the Internet.

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