i found a site (vonage.com) that offers a good deal on voice over ip to replace residential phone service. it's cool because you can use your existing telephones with an adapter and if you have a cable modem (not a dsl) you can get rid of your local phone service. the drawbacks that i can think of are that if your internet service goes down so does your phone, and the sound quality is supposedly not as good. clay shirky wrote an interesting article that metions vonage.