Internet Telephony
By Avi Rosenthal
06/01/04 - I just got my latest phone bill and boy was it a doozy. As many of you may know I work out of my home, while the company that I work for is located about 1,100 miles away. This means that I am on the phone a lot, not only with customers but with HQ and as you can imagine my long distance charges can be quite high, even with the best rate available from the phone company. A lot of people work out of their home these days and one of the most important tools that they have at their disposal other than a computer is the telephone.
The difference of course between your computer and your telephone is that you do not pay for your computer time as you use it, your use and internet time is charged at a flat fee; while your phone bill grows with every phone call. Well there is a technology that is gaining popularity that will merge these two devices. An Internet Phone.
An Internet phone service uses the Internet, instead of normal phone lines, to send your voice. In most cases, you just plug your current telephone into a small box that your Internet phone company provides to you.
The small box, in turn, plugs into your broadband Internet connection. Just as with regular telephone service, you pick up the phone and get a dial tone and press numbers on the keypad to call the person you want to talk to. As with a regular telephone, you can call anybody in the world that has a phone. Another choice is to use a "soft-phone" your computer becomes your telephone, and you talk via a handset or a headset plugged into a USB port.
Of course, the reasons to change how you make a phone call are: cost and available features. The biggest advantage of Internet telephones is that the phone calls can be extremely cheap or even free to anywhere in the world.
However, just as with ordinary phone services, it can be hard to figure out which companies offer the best savings for your particular calling habits. But if you normally call a particular area (for example, headquarters), you can almost certainly find an Internet phone plan with rates that are incredibly low. With some providers, calling other users on the same system can be completely free, similar to what cell phone companies are doing it these days.
Cost is not the only advantage however; it's the features that really interest some Internet phone users. You can do things with an Internet phone service that no traditional phone can offer.
Internet phones work independently of any local exchange, so you're not tied to any one area code. This means that you can take your phone number with you when you move; it's as easy as packing the adapter you get from your service provider.
You don't have to end your old phone service in one city and go through the hassle of setting up service in another. One of the coolest features is that with many systems, you also get a choice of area codes. You can be running a small business from your hometown and put your area code in the region that your customers are, so that they do not have to call long distance to talk to you.
You can also get great integration with your computer. Some systems send all your voicemail to your e-mail in-box and let you dial phone numbers directly from your contact manager. And even the smallest company can set up a virtual phone system that spans offices (or home offices) yet functions very much like a phone system used by a corporation with dozens of worldwide offices. For example, a small business can get features such as simultaneous ringing, in which a call to your main number rings on all three of your employees' phones, even if some of them are not Internet phones.
At this point, though, Internet phone service isn't for everyone. While VoIP (Voice over IP) hardware and software isn't as complex and hard to set up as other office technologies, like wireless networking, it's still not as simple as normal telephone service. Also, the quality of VoIP is variable. In the best cases, it can be far superior to that of a regular phone, especially for international calls.
However, if your call ends up routed over a heavily used portion of the Internet, quality can be affected, which creates an uncomfortable lag between the two people in a conversation.
In my next article, I will dig deeper into how Internet Telephony works and what companies are involved.
Internet Telephony --Part II
06/14/04 - In the last column we started to talk about Internet Telephony. To review: check out the link at the bottom of the page to get to the archives. But in summary, my phone bills were way too high and I needed an alternative. So we're talking about Internet Telephony.
This time I'm going to tell you how it actually works and some of the companies involved. Many different forms of Internet telephony exist. Some systems, such as Skype, a free download, work only between two computers using particular software, similar to Instant Messaging. Once you download the software, you "call" someone using their ID, they answer and you can carry on a conversation. It works quite well, but is limited to users of that service.
Other systems, such as Vonage's service, allow anyone with a broadband connection to use their existing telephone hardware or their computer, to call any other phone in the world, whether that phone is on the same service, an internet phone or not. The beauty of this system is that you use the standard phones that are already in your home. They are connected to a special piece of equipment that Vonage supplies.
Setup is pretty easy, and Vonage has tech support if you need help. The really nice thing is that they all charge a flat rate for unlimited domestic long distance and local calling and very cheap rates for international calls. The phone companies, not wanting to become obsolete, are not far behind in the internet telephony revolution.
AT&T has joined the fray, as has Verizon. All of the services are about the same, and the features of each are very similar, but read the fine print carefully they are getting as complicated as cell phone plans. Vonage was the first to market, and has the most experience in this fledgling industry.
The one thing all VoIP solutions have in common is that they take your voice and convert it into data packets that are then routed over the Net just like other Internet traffic. For calls to a standard telephone, the data call obviously has to connect to the public phone network at some point; Internet phone services provide this connection seamlessly.
A potentially serious limitation is the Internet itself, the more people use it, the more bandwidth is needed to support it. With any VoIP system there is the possibility that your conversation will be interrupted when the connection is overloaded. This is rare, but it does happen. If your broadband connection is not very reliable, then think carefully before giving up your regular phone.
In the most flexible form of VoIP, Internet technology replaces the connection between the telephone and the phone company. You plug an ordinary telephone into an adapter that connects to your broadband home network. Simply pick up the phone and dial, your call is routed over the Internet to a VoIP service provider. This provider connects your calls to the public telephone system. If the person you are calling is also a user of the same Internet calling system, the call will never touch the public phone system at all.
As time goes on and broadband becomes more and more accessible, VoIP will become easier and easier to use and maintain. It is already a great alternative to having standard long distance service on your home phone. So, if you work out of your home, have relatives that live far away or are just sick of paying the phone company, give Internet Telephony a try. As always, I would love to hear from you about your experiences, let me know what you think!
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Avi Rosenthal has been in the low-voltage industry for over 8 years. He has been profiled in CE Pro Magazine and Electronic House Magazine as well as quoted as an "Industry Expert" in many publications. He is an SME for CompTIA's HTI+ certification, and is also a regular speaker and lecturer at industry trade shows, including the EH Expo, CES and the International Builders' Show.
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