This isn't your mom's phone service

Once upon a time, your home telephone service was dependent on copper wires criss-crossing the country and you had a pretty simple choice when it came to your provider -- Bell Canada or nobody.

The digital age

Then came the digital age, with satellites and fibre-optic cables and deregulation, and your home phone service could come from your cable television provider or one of any number of small companies that sprouted up offering to send telephone calls through an Internet connection.

"Bits are bits," said Tom Keenan, a University of Calgary technology expert. "The Internet doesn't care if it's data, a streaming video or if it's a phone conversation, it just sends bits."

Thanks to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, companies now require very little infrastructure and hardware to provide home telephone service.

High-speed Internet connection

With a high-speed Internet connection, an adapter and a regular phone, subscribers can now enjoy telephone service routed through a computer network, often at a substantial discount from traditional carriers such as Bell and Telus.

"Increasingly, people are divorcing the idea that to make a phone call we have to pick up this black thing that's been hanging on the wall for 20 years.

Dozen or so cable

Home telephone subscribers in Ontario can choose from a dozen or so cable and Internet-based providers -- some well-known, such as Cogeco and Rogers, and some less-known, such as Acanac, Comwave and Hamilton-based talkit.ca.

Because the subscriber pays for the Internet connection, the phone and, typically, the adapter, a startup company that wants to provide Internet-based phone service has few infrastructure costs.

What they do pay for is what's known as a call completion fee, which is paid to the traditional phone carriers to jump an Internet-based call back to the copper wire part of the system.

The call into the public switch telephone network

"When they dump the call into the public switch telephone network, they have to pay for termination and it's minuscule what they have to pay," Hoey said.

Because Internet-based phone subscribers can have telephone numbers from virtually any area code regardless of where they live, a 911 call isn't automatically tied to the address of where the call originates.