Verizon's future starts where the scuffed green floor ends on the second story of a windowless brick blockhouse in Baldwin Park, CA, a Latino community east of Los Angeles. Past that point, the building's old asbestos-filled floor tiles were removed in March and replaced with shiny white ones, marking the place where circuit switching, the method long used to connect one phone to any other, gives way to packet switching, the technology that makes the Internet so powerful. It's a project that promises to change Verizon's business -- and eventually, the way we all think about phone service.

Pamela and Grant Jacoby, husband-and-wife members of the Verizon project team who are showing off their new system to a reporter, say they celebrated their anniversary by going to dinner and then coming here to watch a HazMat team rip out the old flooring. Romantic? No. "But how many times do you get to see that?" says Grant, as his wife laughs.