Call Forwarding

Legal Affairs, March, 2004 by Nicholas Thompson

WHEN ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL transmitted his voice over 100 yards of wire in the first public demonstration of the telephone in 1876, the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II exclaimed, "My God, it talks." The invention demonstrated a truth articulated by the sci-fi master Arthur C. Clarke almost a century later: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Since then, advances in telephone technology have been useful but unspectacular.

But now it's again time for something worthy of Dom Pedro's exclamation. Thanks to a rapidly growing technology called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), if the regulators get the regulations right, we could rid ourselves of the need for telephone poles and $80 monthly phone bills within a few years. Making a call would...

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