"John Gilmer" wrote in message

I guess I don't know much about the "business model" used
by the VOIP companies.

For example, Google provides its services for free in the
hope that we will glance it the paid ads. It hopes that
the Gmail users will use web mail a lot and thus view the
ads rather than accessing it via a mail server (which I
do.)
If a company offers very low cost VOIP calls it still has
the cost of connecting to the conventional "wired"
telephone network. Is this cost trivial?

I have seen no extra cost other than around $7 for shipping.