BIOS: Technology Means Business

It's good to talk, especially on the phone. The trouble is, contrary to the old saying, telephone talk is not particularly cheap. But that's all about to change. Using the USB-based VoIP Cyberphone, which comes bundled with free Skype software, you can make free telephone calls to other Voice-over-IP (VoIP) Cyberphones as well as low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles all over the world.

Pros: More traditional way of making VoIP calls; cheap landline calls
Cons: Few people currently have VoIP technology installed

Internet telephony consists of hardware and software that enables you to use the Internet as the transmission medium for telephone calls. If you have free, or fixed-price Internet access, Internet telephony software essentially provides free telephone calls anywhere in the world. To date, however, Internet telephony does not offer the same quality of telephone service as direct telephone connections.

The VoIP Cyberphone is a more practical and traditional way to make VoIP telephone calls compared to a fiddly headset. According to the company, all you do is install the supplied CD-ROM, plug the phone into the nearest USB socket on your laptop or computer, and then dial away. The nifty VoIP technology then digitally converts your voice through your broadband Internet connection and on to its final destination - be it a fellow Cyberphone owner, a normal landline or even a mobile phone - anywhere in the world.

The best thing about the VoIP Cyberphone is that you can talk to fellow Cyberphone owners and Skype users for absolutely nothing, which is great if you've got colleagues, friends and relatives strewn across the globe who are also technically minded. For regular calls to landlines, Firebox claims the phone will save you up to 85 per cent off standard BT rates.

To give you an idea of how much you can save, a call to a mobile phone in the US costs a measly 1.2p per minute using Skype. There's no pesky subscription fee either - all you do is buy pay-as-you-go 'SkypeOut credits'. This system does work on 56Kbit/s dial-up connections, albeit at lower sound quality. Currently the CyberPhone software only supports PCs, although Mac software is on the way.