There are quite a few stories here in the blog about "Long Distance". What is long distance? When the grandkids come from the Philadelphia area to Connecticut to visit, they consider that a long distance. When visiting Singapore or New Zealand or other parts of Southeastern Asia, you know you are a long way from New York — like 10,000 miles or so. When we head to Johannesburg, South Africa from JFK tomorrow, that will be a long distance (approximately 8,000 miles).
When it comes to a "telephone" conversation, the words "long distance" don’t really mean anything. Many of us remember the phone ringing decades ago at grandma’s house at holiday time and the room immediately being urged to "shhhhhh" because the call was "long distance". Hurry, we would say as we waited our turn for a few seconds to say hello to the caller. Long distance was considered a luxury then but now is becoming a merely historical term.
Many of us who have been involved with the Internet have known for a long time that voice over IP, or Internet Telephony, would become ubiquitous. It is just so natural to utilize the global infrastructure of the Internet to send information between any two points. The world is actually a small place when you consider the speed of today’s networks. I recall being at an Internet Society meeting in Honolulu in 1994 participating on a panel about the future of the Internet. A fellow panelist, Geoff Huston from Telstra, made a simple but, at the time, very controversial point. Geoff said that “voice” is "just another kind of data". What he meant, of course, was that once you speak into a handset or headset and your voice is converted to a stream of ones and zeroes, the "bits" traveling over the Internet look just like any other bits — like from web pages, emails, efaxes, audio, video, etc.
How will I stay in touch while in South Africa? I will be taking my iPhone because that is where all my calendar and contact details are, but when it comes to phone calls and the mobile Internet, the Apple – AT&T team does not make it easy. Apple locks the iPhone so you can not put a Vodacom South Africa SIM card in it — Apple wants to be sure to get their commission from AT&T. In South Africa, AT&T charges $2.49 per minute for inbound or outbound calls, fifty cents for a text message, and $20 per megabyte for data service. (Some modest discounts are available if you sign up for a monthly international plan). Some unwarry travelers have forgetten to turn off automatic email retrieval in their iPhone and ended up with thousands of dollars in charges from AT&T.
Maxroam is an innovative VoIP company in Ireland. For a little more than $40 they send you a SIM card which you can put into any unlocked GSM phone — such as the Treo which I held onto after getting the iPhone. Maxroam also gives you a U.S. mobile phone number. If someone calls my iPhone while I am out of the country it will automatically forward to the Treo. If I want to make a call I dial from the Treo using whatever local GSM operator is available. The cost for Maxroam varies by country — in South Africa it is 39 cents per minute for inbound calls and 49 cents per minute for local or outbound calls. Most outbound calls will be made from the hotel room with my ThinkPad using Skype at two cents per minute.
Where does all this lead? If innovation and competition continue — and I believe they will — then we will have choices. One choice will be to have a WiFi mobile phone with Skype on it. If Apple continues to thwart that option on the iPhone, others will provide it. If governments and operators cling to the old models, it will take a while but there is no doubt in my mind that we will soon have a wide range of choices of service available on the Internet — wherever we are and with whatever devices we have.
