Internet communications...anyone have any insights

I'm looking at doing an internet company, but I'm wondering how far away viable live voice communications are. The things I've heard are two years, but my questions is, is it just a question of compression technology that we're still developing, or is it simply financial, i.e., the cost of bandwidth vs. long distance telephone. Any info you guys have would be great, and I'd love to hear from you if you're working on this kind of thing... __________________ Hi there I work for an internet based co. and we are currently trying to get the VOICE OVER IP going..Still don't know when the official date on that is though. __________________ I'm sorry, call me ignorant, but what is voice over IP? [goddamn flood control!!] __________________ Voice over IP - I believe that's what you're talking about when you say 'live voice communications'. It's a viable technology that's up & running today (check out http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/779...lephony.html). With the right equipment, any network (including the Internet) can be used to run voice communications as well as data. I'm sure you've heard of or seen http://dialpad.com or http://net2phone.com? That's voice over IP running over the public Internet (for free, no less!). Just about every major communications vendor is working on this technology - Cisco, Nortel, Lucent, etc. Just visit their websites to see what they're doing - it's pretty cool. This stuff has AT&T and other long distance carriers in a frenzy - imagine if a huge, multi-national company like, say, General Motors suddenly decided to implement this for all of their offices. They already have a WAN infrastructure in place - they just need the phone equipment and all of a sudden they have their own private phone network. Bye-bye long distance company for office to office calls! In reality, it's not quite as simple as that, but you get the picture.