As the time approached for us to report on our first quarterly results under the new plan, IDT’s stock began to rise. This was not surprising. Our customers, suppliers, and lenders all knew how well we were doing from their dealing with us. Only the investment bankers were in the dark. The results, when reported, smashed all their forecasts. We reported our first quarterly profit as a public company. This, amazingly, even after absorbing the huge severance costs. It was the first profit ever reported for a public company so largely involved in the Internet industry. After the report was issued, investor enthusiasm drove our stock still higher, more than double its price just a few months earlier. I was worth over a hundred million dollars again. My phone started to ring. “Old friends” and fund-raisers suddenly wanted to renew acquaintances. Somehow, I was less than interested. My interest was engaged elsewhere. Running IDT had become fun again.

It turned out the bandwagon was only beginning to roll. Our small but extraordinarily talented Net2Phone development team, led by Jeff Goldberg, former chief technical officer of Charles River Engineering, free from having to continually take investor groups on lab tours, achieved a true breakthrough. Already we had the only technology enabling users to connect from multimedia PCs over the Internet to regular telephone users. The sound quality, though, like all “Internet telephony” products, was spotty at best. Conversations were always short, as the struggle to make out what was being said made anything more than a simple transmittal of the facts too painful to bother with. Sure, it was often 95 percent cheaper than a normal call, but if you can’t hear, so what?

Jeff’s new product, however, broke the sound barrier. It wasn’t that the sound came somewhat closer to what normal telephone users had come to expect. It came the whole way. In fact, PC magazine not only bestowed its top award on the new product, it said that in test calls most users couldn’t tell the difference between the Internet and the real call. Suddenly articles were appearing and software awards were coming in from all over the world.

Users were signing up so quickly that the personnel department could barely keep up with staffing needs. The average call time lengthened from two minutes to the normal call average of six minutes, indicating the quality was indeed comparable to that of an average call. Stunned by the new technologies, large foreign partners began to put up millions to procure national exclusives for the new phone-to-phone product, which was to be released imminently, or for traditional Net2Phone distributorship.

Foreign monopolies went into a panic over the new technology and started calling for international conferences to regulate this new threat. Senate and congressional committee chairpeople started calling for hearings to undermine any such anti-competitive legislation that foreign governments might impose. The White House called us to pledge support and was soon issuing statements warning against regulating us. By the time our computerless phone-to-phone product debuted in the summer, breaking the cost barrier for even domestic calls, we were riding a tiger and Net2Phone was way into the black.

Although we couldn’t 100 percent keep up with demand, nobody complained. Instead, the press adulated us. What a change from just months earlier when we were being dragged through the mud. Things had gotten so bad my mother had turned off all the radios in her house for days, not being able to stand hearing all the bad reports, some of which seemed to attack me personally.