• A long time coming: A new generation of phone services has arrived. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony works – and customers now have choice – It works well enough to be considered a substitute for the traditional circuit-switched telephone.
• Consumers will balance needs for reliability, quality, security, functionality and mobility, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the many options of phone service and choose what is right for them.
• New offerings, from new service providers: such as Primus® (TalkBroadband™), babyTEL®, Vonage® Canada, Net2Phone®, WebCall by Navigata and Skype™, are providing consumers with alternative connection modalities; and, importantly, they are offering new ways of managing the voice communications dynamic.

> The proverbial ‘bar’ has been raised. The new services are clearly superior, from a functional perspective, to the old.

• Feature sets are expanding. Consumers now have more choice in how and where and when they make and receive calls.
• VoIP services will grow as customers become comfortable with the technology. SeaBoard forecasts suggest that over 250,000 subscribers will try a VoIP service by the end of 2005. By 2009, as many as a quarter of all telephone subscribers may have substituted a local wireline phone for a VoIP offering.