When we moved to Vienna, we decided that we didn’t need telephone or cable service into our home. The reason for this is that in the very near future, all one will need to communicate with the world and pull entertainment from that same world is a broadband connection. Anyone telling you otherwise is wrong. You don’t even need any hardware other than a PC (or Mac, preferably). You don’t need Vonage’s stuff. You don’t need BellSouth’s “VOIP” service. You need:

Fast broadband

And that’s it. We use Skype for our telephony and it has worked out to be way cheaper and better than regular phone or competing VOIP services. We can call any number in the world for cheaper than just about any other method and people can call us on our US-based telephone number.

We download our music.

And, soon, we’ll download all of our video on demand. Until then, the miracle that is YouTube continues to provide:

Maple has watched this video, oh, I don’t know, four million times. She loves it. Soon, one will be able to pull virtually any show ever to one’s computer in high quality versions and watch it when one wants. It’ll be like Tivo, but infinite and better.