VoIP: How to phone online

Have family overseas? Want your college kid to call home freely? Now, using the Net for long-distance phoning is easy on the family budget as well as easy to do. It starts at $29.95/month for unlimited calls anywhere in the US and Canada and 4 cents/minute for international calls. The Washington Post lays it all out very clearly - the two types of Net telephony (using your regular phone or special equipment); the cost; the providers; the how-to-plug-in; and two important caveats (911 service and electrical outages, which suggest that we not eliminate land lines entirely). As for Mac users, CNET reports that Skype just launched its service for them this week (in beta, but don't let that deter you - Skype for PCs had at least hundreds of thousands of users while it was still being beta-tested).