Web phone conferencing, which is telephone calls made using an internet connection (broadband is ideal),is perceived as the next century of the telecommunications era by some and as a staple of today by others. This type of calls is often addressed as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the realm of peer-to-peer communication.

Internet telephony , still another name to refer to the phenomenon, is very simple to use and opens a new way, a number of ways, to save money on over-the-planet calls over traditional landline horns as well as on mobile calls. Skype, Vonage, Net2Phone, Firefly, Hotmail and Yahoo Messengers, are among the leading providers of the service. Skype is the most popular due to the unparalleled sound quality, which is often better than that provided by other programs or traditional phones.

What can it be good for? Well, most companies supply you with free download of software. Once you have downloaded it, gathered a standard kit of VoIP paraphernalia – a headset, speakers or a USB phone – you can do several things. The cheapest one is to encourage your friends and relatives to download the same software and chat with each other for free, wherever your talking partners are. With Skype, for example, you can see which of your contacts are online and just need to push a green button to initiate the conversation and a red one to hang up.

Even if your relatives living in an Indian village have only a PC and speakers and the program, you can still give them an Internet ring and tell the latest news and they’ll just listen.

And if they don’t have any of it and you do want to hear them, you can call a regular phone. The costs are spirit-raisingly lower than those charged by phone companies. On average, you may be charged 0.17 euro per minute to call to a fixed phone, but that depends on the location you make a phone call from, not to – tariffs vary. You can also reach a person on a mobile and here as well the charges are pretty cheap.

Another feature: conference calls. You can talk with up to four people at a time and send instant messages simultaneously. As well, you can invite up to 48 people to chat, share a gossip or talk over the upcoming meeting.

Most companies offer accessories online, including headsets, plug-in and cyber phone handsets that you need to connect to USB port or you can go wireless with a cordless one. The latter allows you to walk and talk within a radius of 300 meters.

With virtual communications in full swing, the number of Internet telephony users is escalating. In 1998 PC2PC calls accounted for only 1% of the voice traffic in America , in 2000 – 3%, while in 2005 Internet telephony is expected to invade 25-40% of it. Revenues from VoIP equipment sales are predicted to come to $3 billion this year and are being forecast to surpass $8.5 billion by the end of 2008.