This is kinda off-topic, but I feel that my fellow geeks will appreciate it. I'm an alpha tester for the Free World Dialup (http://www.freeworldialup.com). It's a box (made by Cisco, although others will be making them too) that you hook into your DSL or cable connection (or anything fast), and your phone line. When you make a call, it contacts a central server, and that server tells it if there is another gateway in the area code/country that you are calling, instructs the remote gateway to dial the person you want, and then connects the call over IP, NO long distance charges. I just called New Jersey, and Sydney, Austrailia. The pings to the gateway in Sydney were over 300ms, yet the call quality was absolutely perfect with no noticable delay. New Jersey had around 170ms pings and was perfect also. Supposedly, if our testing goes well, you'll be able to pick these gateways up for around $150 at Best Buy this summer. Basically, in exchange for free calls, you make your line available to others in the world so they can call numbers which are local to you. Right now, the protocol they are using is uncompressed, and uses about 64kbps of bandwidth. Cisco IP phones use about 8kbps when compressed. So if they implement the compressed codec into the gateway, you'd probably be able to use it over a modem. Way cool. Jay