by MICHAEL CITROME

It sounds pretty awesome - a long-distance plan that costs $20 a year and gives you 200 calls a month anywhere in Quebec for free, plus all calls to the rest of Canada and the U.S. are five cents a minute. Called Quebec Call Zone, it's a new service offered by a young company called Onlinetel. The Ontario version debuted last year.

But what's most exciting about Call Zone isn't the cheap rates - less than half annually than its cheapest competitor - it's the tech behind it. Call Zone uses a new technology that's changing the telecom world. It's called Voice Over Internet Protocol or VoIP.

The way VoIP works is simple. You call up a special number that connects to a computer, which takes your phone conversation and samurai-sword-chops it up into tiny data packets, then sends them over the Internet. Then a computer in the local area of the person you're calling decodes the data and presents it on the other end as a regular phone call.

It's the same idea as Internet audio-conferencing, except you don't need a computer or any other special equipment to do it.

"Quebec Call Zone is a phone-to-phone service that can be used from any regular or cellular telephone," says Onlinetel's Jason Moretto.

And don't worry about your chitchat clogging up the Internet - Onlinetel has its own private pipes, "and voice traffic consumes far less bandwidth than data and music files," Moretto says.

According to Moretto, this phone-Internet convergence is a sign of things to come, if everyone can agree to play along.

"We are fast heading toward an era of converged services over a single connection or through a single device," he says. "The networks that deliver external content to these devices have already converged years ago. It may well come down to a regulatory issue similar to the deregulation of the long-distance industry in the early '90s."

Onlinetel is on the Web at www.onlinetel.com.