The movie Extra Terrestrial (ET) coined phrase “phone home” and each year American’s look for more cost effective ways to do just that. The past 10 years have seen development and growing popularity of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies to achieve cost savings over traditional circuit-switched telephone networks. The two dominate technologies used for VoIP are: (1) Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and (2) Peer-2-Peer (P2P). For business and educational institutions SIP VoIP solutions have produced substantial savings. For home voice users, however, SIP VoIP is still value challenged.

A typical circuit-switched landline phone costs about $19.95 per month (plus tax). The good old American landline phone should be graphically depicted beside word “reliable” in dictionary. Not only does it keep working, even when all electrical power fails, but it can even provide you with a light to dial with. At $15 dollars per month SIP VoIP is still value challenged due to lack of full support for E9-1-1 emergency services and of course reliability issues inherent with using a real time application over a “best effort” network like today's Internet. Although few VoIP articles still reference Internet Request For Comments (RFC) 3714 “IAB Concerns Regarding Congestion Control,” technical challenges associated with VoIP are widely known. Further, even with recent dubious edict by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that VoIP service providers will provision support for E9-1-1 within 90 days, this still leaves reliability issues unresolved. The use of adaptive rate CODEC’s to prevent congestion collapse is a swell idea if it applies to my neighbor’s service but not my own. Using adaptive rate CODEC’s to elicit voluntary user preemption has no appeal in modern world. Technology is supposed to be getting better and it is clearly not better that users receive disconnects or degraded service quality in order to constrain network bandwidth consumption.

What Exactly Does Free Mean? Realistically, consumers subconsciously assume free means free, and while that might be initial intent, rarely is it truly case.

Why do Companies Offer Things for Free? Companies or individuals may promote a free offer or service for any number of reasons. From branding to ad revenue, companies often use "free" to attract attention or interest. As a consumer, it is important to realize what "free" might really mean.

Reasons Things Are Free:

Linking Companies may offer something in exchange for a link back to their website. As web becomes increasingly more competitive, linking can effect more than just search engine placement, and providing a product, service or information free of charge in exchange for a link can be a good business decision. Often, publishers will create articles like this one and make it available for syndication, with stipulation being that author resource box that follows article remain intact, providing links back to author's website. Bottom line, authors often make content available for syndication in exchange for links back to their websites, which they benefit from.

Ad Revenue Some companies provide a product or service free of charge and generate money from advertising. Perhaps they sell banner advertising on their website. A free product draws web traffic so that number of visitors seeing advertisement increases. The more visitors a site attracts, typically more revenue generated from ad space. Perhaps a software application is free of charge, but has embedded advertisements. When ads are clicked, software developer earns a percentage of revenue paid for serving advertisement.

Goodwill Branding / Public Relations On occasion, companies will provide a product, service or information free of charge. If offering is extremely magnanimous or socially sensitive, they will often receive significant press exposure, generating free publicity for their brand. Pepsi Cola sponsors a number of athletic events and generates enormous amounts of brand loyalty and positive PR with their target audience.