Phone calls over the Internet are the wave of the future and Vonage is cashing in now

• Like the technology he's pushing, Jeffrey Citron, the 34-year-old CEO of Internet phone company Vonage, has a tendency to shake things up.
• In 2000, he began pouring his own money---$70 million and counting---into Vonage, an upstart telephone company that is now revolutionizing this $1 trillion industry.
• By 2008 that number will rise to 16 million, according to market-research firm Frost & Sullivan, as broadband Internet connections grow.
• London-based technology consultancy Ovum says that if you include all the people downloading software from companies like Europe's Skype, which charges only for calls to non-Skype users, the number of Net phoners around the world will reach 200 million in four years.
• According to a recent AT&T survey, dozens of multinational firms already have their employees making Internet voice calls, and 43 percent are currently using, testing or planning to implement such systems within the next two years.
• Today telephone companies still bill customers according to the time and distance of their calls, as voice travels mainly over individual circuits that open and close with each call.
• "VoIP will mean the end of picking up a phone, talking and then hanging up," says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif.
• The race among firms like Samsung, Sony and Apple to invent the next killer apps for consumers will grow more anarchic.
• In a speech late last year, FCC chairman Michael Powell described the Internet phone call as a "revolution" with "profound implications" for the telecom industry, and called for a "new constitution for the regulation of such services, one befitting that revolution."
• Unlike Vonage, which has a more traditional flat-rate charge system, Skype distributes free file-sharing software that enables users who are both on the system to talk to each other free of charge.