I'm slow to post this, but it's important enough that I'm going to tag on the tail end anyway.

My friend Moshe Maeir at The Flat Planet sent me a note letting me know about a special program they've got underway.

How to get a Free Linksys SPA942 IP Phone

With the new promotion from the Flat Planet Phone Company!

From today all resellers who sign up for the yearly $199 Reseller program will receive a FREE Cisco Linksys SPA942 phone and a $200 rebate* on purchases of IP telephony equipment from VoIP Supply.

This is really an important event, but I'm going to take a slightly different context.

First, it's just a great deal from a money perspective. It's a deal you can't lose money on. That's a guarantee that anyone can understand.

But I think it's important for a larger reason. I've talked a lot over the past ten years about VoIP providers and how the barrier to entry into the telecommuncations business, as a service provider, has continually dropped. Through Moshe's efforts, what we're seeing today is that it's becoming cheaper and easier every day for people with business plans, people who want to deliver quality services. people who want to provide top notch customer support to enter the telecommunications market as service providers.

It doesn't take multimillion dollar investments in infrastructure to begin to provide basic, high-quality services. No #5ESS, no major cabling, no central office.

VoIP was heralded as a disruptive technology, but the utopian view of VoIP annihilating traditional telecommunications never really came to pass. Moshe and the Flat Planet team aren't disrupting technology, they're disrupting service delivery by changing the face of how telecommunications services can be provided.

That's nothing short of earthshaking when you think about reshaping an industry. I said many months ago, after I'd first met Moshe, that he was one of the quiet, perhaps unnoticed heroes of the industry. He proves it with the direction he brings to telecommuncations.