Skype the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. A Skype user can have local numbers in any of these countries, with calls to the number charged at the same rate as calls to fixed lines in the country. The countries on this growing list are referred to collectively as the SkypeIn Countries. Skype supports conference calls, video chats, and screen sharing between 25 people at a time for free. Skype does not provide
Telephone have switched to this digital telephone service. A January 2005 Newsweek article suggested that Internet telephony may be "the next big thing." As of 2006 many VoIP companies offer service to consumers and businesses. From a customer perspective, IP telephony uses a high-bandwidth Internet connection and specialized customer premises equipment to transmit telephone calls via the Internet, or any modern private data network. The customer equipment may be an analog telephone adapter (ATA) which interfaces a conventional analog telephone to the IP networking equipment, or it may be an IP Phone that has the networking and interface technology built into