Have you ever Voiped? If not, you probably know someone who has. Voice Over Internet Protocol, for the uninitiated, is a way of making very cheap phone calls using an internet connection instead of a conventional phone line or, indeed, a mobile.

One Internet telephone service provider is rolling out a cross-country radio campaign that is a little suggestive in an effort to get "VoIP" into the vernacular. The Vonage Canada commercials feature characters who talk about "VoIPing" their partners twice in the morning or fondly recall the first time they VoIPed. "We're making VoIP a verb," said Joe Parent, Vonage's vice-president of marketing and business development. "We're not trying to be racy … we're trying to be different."

But there is another impediment to widespread VoIPing: the CRTC.

The federal regulator has sent very confusing signals on VoIP, largely, I think, because its instinct always is to regulate everything it can, but VoIP could be beyond its reach without the co-operation of internet service providers.