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Seriously, we are in the midst of the convergence of voice and data and that is challenging the infrastructure of the telephone companies. There are huge commercial interests in the basic technology, but even more so in content delivery and control of content.

One way or another, we need to understand that broadband is essentially telephone service, and just as we got to telephone service in the United States to one hundred per cent, we need to do it for broadband.

Simply put, broadband voice is an interstate matter that must be dealt with through clear national standards.

It is very clear that voice communications is moving on to the Internet. In the end, the price that anyone can provide for voice transmission on the Net will trend toward zero.

The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.

The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity.

What is special about VOIP is that it's just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing - or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax - that you can do on the public switched telephone network.

Big companies, which spend tens of billions of dollars annually on 'call centers' to take orders and provide customer support, increasingly rely on speech recognition not just to handle requests for information but to process customer orders.

When I grew up in India, telephones were a rarity. In fact, they were so rare that elected members of Parliament had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines as a favor to those they deemed worthy. If you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman or an influential journalist, or a doctor or something, you might have a telephone.

We feel there is already widespread broadband available today.