The commercials were obnoxious, but I had a friend who called his sister in Tunisia for hours using that one low price - he thought it was a miracle product.
In the early 90s, I remarked to a colleague that the telcos who had been gouging their customers for years for long distance and overseas calls could and should get their comeuppance with the advent of the internet as a worldwide communications medium. The colleague scoffed and said the internet could never replace the telcos’ specific call-by-call, number-by-number, line-by-line routing of voice traffic.
Well, I didn’t become a VOIP tycoon but I was spot on with my prediction. I didn’t like that colleague anyway.
I thought Al Gore invented that, too. /sarc.