Have you ever used an Internet telephone? You may have used one and not known it. Any person who calls you may be using the Internet telephone, and may be saving as much as 80% over what you would pay to call them. The only telltale sign that a caller may be using an Internet telephone: the connection may not be as good as normal. According to the Wall Street Journal these Net phone calls could be costing AT&T as much as $350,000,000 dollars a year by 2001. Don’t worry too much about poor AT&T, though. At this minute, the company is going after Japanese business using the same Internet technology.

Today I can make a call to another computer anywhere in the world for the cost of a local call if the call recipient and I have the same software, speakers and microphones on our computers. Companies all over the world are starting to move in the direction of the Internet. They know the old phone system will not be the system of the future. They’re not sure how you will make money but they’re sure they should be there—and be there in a big way. The biggest proof is WorldCom’s $37 billion offer to buy MCI. The attempted merger is WorldCom’s attempt to acquire MCI’s Internet capabilities, rather than traditional old-style telco assets.

If you want to bet on stock for your fortune, pick the potentially biggest winner out of the pile and bet on it now. Someone will make a lot of money on this and it will cost others a lot to learn how the new system works.

Why is all this cheaper and why will it stay that way, you ask? Well! Phone calls in the current standard are connected directly from the caller to the called and cannot be shared with any other caller. Internet calls come as packets of data. These packets are sent out via the Internet to find their way to the location you called. When they arrive they are reassembled in the same order in which you spoke them. While moving between the two points they follow the most convenient path, which allows them all to go around the world in two different directions, and still be assembled at the last moment and become language again. All this means a much more efficient use of wire and fiber optic hardware. The cost of locked-up hardware with traditional connections is about four or five times that of the packet system.

No matter how you cut it, the result will be cheaper. Now the good news is that new, smaller, very efficient and competitive companies will be competing for your long-distance dollar, which means that you may see even bigger savings because they may not run as fat as the current long-distance carriers. Whichever way you look at it, you’ll soon be either an investor in or a user of this new technology.

I love it when people and companies race to save me money.

—Don