When the Internet started appearing in more and more businesses, an inevitable innovation quickly followed for companies with multiple locations. They found ways to link these locations together to share data securely in “virtual private networks” over the Internet and quickly dropped the expensive private data lines provided by phone companies. Having fifty locations suddenly had vastly decreased expenses for keeping information synchronized and flowing in real time between the branches. The next big innovation was naturally to combine another kind of technology to this formula: audio digitization. Big companies next shed huge expenses for interoffice calling by shipping those calls in digital format over an Internet connection for which they were already paying. A thousand phones in a hundred locations worldwide were now effectively in the same building.