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To add to what Fallon says, and despite a lot of hype you hear about it on the net, the primary market for VoIP is NOT aimed at routing voice traffic over the Internet. Such products exist, but the big players are making products to replace your existing PABX and possibly send voice over your existing WAN links. The Internet simply has too much lag to support voice reliably. Until such time as the Internet introduces some kind of QoS (Quality of Service), then you won't see large-scale deployments of VoIP on public IP networks.
Where you WILL see a lot of VoIP is in large companies (like my own) that don't want to have to install two seperate networks; one for data and one for voice. VoIP offers many many advantages over "old style" voice solutions. You can introduce richer content and services (video and context information, smart telephones, XML applications etc), you can SAVE MONEY by sending some of your voice traffic over your WAN (if you're a big company with many offices in many sites, you're already paying for a data network between them so why not use if for voice too and avoid paying telephone bills), you can get significant RETURN ON INVESTMENT by implementing dynamice and intelligent Least Cost Call Routing, you can converge your data and voice networks...
The list goes on and on.
Don't let the hype put you off. VoIP is getting big and is going to be huge. However, at least for the moment, it's NOT about sending voice over the internet (apart from small dinky companies and toys etc), but it IS about converging data and voice.
Sometime in the future, when the Internet is a more reliable, more speedy network, you will see all the old telephone companies die. That's why the likes of the BabyBells, ROTCs, telecom providers and SPs are either shitting themselves or jumping on the bandwagon.
Mr Mephisto
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