During the fall VON I was asked by Jeremy Wagstaff, Far East Asia columnist for the Wall Street Journal, to give him some insight about VoIP. Since I’m a regular reader and sometimes comment poster on Jeremy’s blog, LooseWire I was elated to be able to be the authority in his story. Once the WSJ link is up I’ll add it too but for now this will have to do.
Your Life — Loose Wire: Calls on the Cheap: Use Your Computer
By Jeremy Wagstaff
1,389 words
10 December 2004
The Asian Wall Street Journal P3
English
(c) 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.I’VE BEEN A BIT NERVOUS about using the Internet to talk to people because of past experience. Every time I’ve tried it, the other guy sounds like a frog trapped in a well. Or, as a colleague of my friend Jim so eloquently puts it, “men sound like chipmunks. Women sound like men. And it’s not very reliable.” All true. Or at least it used to be. But has using the Internet to talk to people, known in the trade as voice over Internet protocol, or VOIP, gotten any better? And if it has, what does that mean for us?
To answer these questions I hooked up a few weeks ago in Boston with Andy Abramson, a wine lover, public relations consultant, broadcaster and a follower of VOIP. At the annual Voice Over the Net conference Andy kindly walked me around the exhibits, talked me through the lingo, introduced me to a few folks and steered me away from others. The bottom line: VOIP is already big for lots of people, and it’s going to get bigger.VOIP, simply, is using the Internet (or a network that uses the same standards or protocols), rather than the telephone, to talk to someone. The difference? Telephone networks use something called circuit switching — where a continuous electrical circuit is set up between the two people talking. VOIP uses something called packet switching — where what one person says is broken down in real time into little packets of data, and then passed to the other guy.
The advantages of VOIP? It’s cheaper, because once the IP infrastructure is installed — whether it’s the Internet, or an office network — there’s no extra equipment needed, such as expensive switching stations and whatnot.
None of this is particularly new, so why have things suddenly gotten better? Andy points to several reasons. Firstly, a lot of people now use broadband, instead of dialing through their telephone, to access the Internet. This means faster connections, which make all the packet-making and packet-sending bit faster and easier. Secondly, a lot of people (at least in North America) have ditched their landline telephones for cellphones. This means people are ready for other ways to make phone calls. Thirdly, and crucially, computers are better. The chips that make a computer work can handle doing much more stuff, and since talking over the Internet requires a computer to convert what we’re saying into a digital form that the Internet can understand, the better the chip, the less like a chipmunk you or your interlocutor are going to sound.
On top of that, the headsets and handsets that people use with their computers are getting better. “You’re starting to get better sound going in and out,” says Andy, adding, after a pause: “And telephone is all about sound.”
If all this is news to you, I suggest you try it out through a service such as Skype ( www.skype.com ). Skype allows you to chat with other registered Skype users for nothing, and it also lets you call people on their normal telephone. For this latter option, of course, you have to pay, but it’s a lot cheaper than an ordinary call.I tried calling my itinerant friend Jim, who always seems to be in Liberia, on his cellphone. We yakked for nearly 20 minutes about very little for $4. (Users pay for airtime to particular countries via credit card, although Skype says it is working on alternative ways to buy airtime for those places where payment can’t be made by credit card.)
It sounded even better when I used a special $100 Internet telephone handset from Clarisys, called the i750, which plugs into your USB port and looks like a normal handset except for the fact that the cable seems to come out of the top rather than the bottom. Neal Shact, the man behind the handset, asked me not to ask why that is because apparently everyone asks that, so I didn’t. The point is, that a USB phone converts what you say to digital before it goes anywhere, improving the sound quality. (You could also use a PC headset so long as it has a microphone. Plantronics do a great range of USB headsets. For basic chats, there’s even the option of using the computer’s built-in microphone and speakers.)
But it doesn’t stop there. Big players have figured out that while there isn’t much money to be made in free phone calls, there is money to be made out of VOIP. One way is to offer these services to people who don’t like messing about with computers: AT&T’s CallVantage, for example, offers a flat rate of between $20 and $30 a month by plugging a regular telephone handset into your home Internet connection — bypassing the computer if you want to. (CallVantage is currently running trials of its service in Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.)But where this kind of thing really kicks in are the additional services that AT&T and others can offer. Using Internet standards for all this stuff means that extra bits and pieces can be added just by tweaking some code. “Before it would take 18 to 24 months to bring a new service to market,” says Gary Morgenstern, media relations director at AT&T. This would entail programming lots of switches, negotiating with other networks, etc. Now, using CallVantage you can open a Web page and program your telephone to do things only possible with an expensive business account, such as checking your telephone bill in real time, forwarding a call to any of five different numbers, or setting up distinctive rings for certain incoming calls.
For sure, VOIP has some way to go before it really works for us, but besides the obvious savings it will bring those of us paupered by hefty phone bills, it may also allow us to make more use of our phones, configuring them into being a bit smarter about what they do before they bug us with a ring. Until then, I’ve suddenly started talking to people on the other side of the world — some of them complete strangers — just because VOIP means I can. And very few people think I sound like a chipmunk.
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