VoIP turning telecommunications business inside out

Before business trips, Suneet Tuli used to leave behind a long list of numbers where he could be reached and told important clients to ring him on his cell phone. The routine was cumbersome and cost him about $800 a month in phone bills.

Now, he has local numbers for New York, London and Mexico City despite no permanent presence in any of those cities. The lines automatically forward to another number that seamlessly transfers to a cell phone with the best rates for wherever he happens to be.

Because Tuli's calls are routed mainly over the Internet instead of the traditional voice network, he can make changes to the elaborate setup simply by visiting a Web site. And he's cut his phone bill by about 80 percent.

"Even though it seems a little complicated, in my mind it's all straight," said Tuli, chief executive of DataWind Inc., a Montreal company that makes handheld Internet-browsing devices.

Tuli is in the Voice-over-Internet vanguard, relying ever more on a technology that is transforming what it means to make a phone call by converting our conversations into little packets of data that traverse the Internet.