Skype free calling via the Internet?

My brother sent this to me this morning. I wonder if it could be used for Internet connecting to get free of Eircom's tentacles?

COMPANIES THE AMERICAS: Skype's free calls attract masses
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Financial Times; Mar 11, 2004

A free internet telephone service launched barely six months ago is already growing faster than internet e-mail did in its heyday, posing one of the first big challenges to the traditional telecoms industry from online voice calls.
The headlong expansion of the service, called Skype, makes it the first consumer service to succeed in attracting a mass market for calling over the internet. The potential for uncontrolled growth of free internet voice services has brought dark warnings from established telecoms companies, which still make most of their money from selling traditional voice services to consumers.
Skype has caught on faster than Hotmail, the internet e-mail service that became one of the first big success stories in online communications, according to Steve Jurvetson, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. The new internet voice service is adding 1.2m new users a month, compared with the 1m a month Hotmail added at its peak.
According to its website, Skype has drawn about 8.5m users globally - a level that Hotmail took 14 months to reach. Hotmail became the biggest provider of free internet e-mail before being sold to Microsoft in 1998. Mr Jurvetson was an early backer of Hotmail, and his firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has also financed Skype.
For now, Skype users can only talk to each other through their PCs, limiting its market. However, the expected arrival this year of handsets that use WiFi, the short-range wireless technology, would make it easier to route calls through home computers, at least in the growing number of households with a wireless network.
Traditional telephone companies claim services such as Skype will only appeal to a small group of people and will not cause them serious damage, though many are preparing rival services.
"We'll compete head-on with any internet offer," said Verizon Communications, the largest US telecoms company, which plans to launch its own internet telephony service in the next few months.
Telecoms companies warn that a widespread shift to free internet calling could expose weaknesses in the infrastructure on which the internet runs and lead to a shortage of investment in new networks.
One concern is that a mass switch of voice calls from the telephone network to the web would overburden the communications network. Estimates at Verizon suggest the internet would start to slow once it had to carry 10m-15m simultaneous voice calls.
Skype plans to offer voice calls free but charge for services such as video-conferencing. It was set up by the founders of Kazaa, the renegade online music service that has become a target for legal action from the music industry.