and pay long distance charges from Outer Estonia to Brooklyn!

somewhat off-topic, but if you're in an office where you can transfer calls back and forth between phones then you have a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) of your own or are getting the same service from your Telco. in this case it's much easier to just tell the PBX to connect Phone A to Number B than to have a machine dial and transfer. you can find PBX cards form your PC for not much money that will do really neat things like mailboxes/transfers/menus/music-on-hold/just about everything. a couple hundred dollars and 2 POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) lines and you can have your own personal Operator, a bit more money and a fractional T1 or more and you can start doing really neat things.

IP phones are really really really cool over cool networks. i've talked to the middle of Africa from Southern California and it was cleaner than any other Overseas call i've been on before. the lag was minimal, less than your normal cell-phone conversation.

i'm in the process of setting up some IP phones for an I2 project to link various NOC (Network Operations Center) across the world. when we have a problem on The Net, pick up the phone, dial the AS (Autonomous System) number of the NOC you need to talk to and BAM connected.