This is number 10 in a series of updates on “Long Distance”. What is long distance? When in 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. Those places are a “long distance” away. But when it comes to a “telephone” conversation, the words “long distance” don’t really mean anything. Many of us remember the phone ringing 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. Those days are history.
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 — from web pages, emails, efaxes, audio, video, etc.
IBM Research did some of the early work in the area of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) but the first product I recall using was in 1995 from an Israeli company called VocalTec. They continue as one of the key players. In the early days the technology was impressive but less than perfect. I remember the CEO of Bellsouth giving a speech at PC Forum in the late 1990’s where he mimicked the distortion of a VoIP conversation. It was humorous, but not many people in the audience laughed because we all knew what he did not, which was that VoIP would become ubiquitous and threaten existing telecommunications providers.
Another market participant is Net2Phone, which started in 1996 and is based in New Jersey. I used their VoIP service for a few years before Skype and Teleo came along. Skype now has millions of users. The appeal for many is that calls between Skype users are free. This provides motivation for users to encourage their friends to become users. They make their money on calls from Skype users to non-users, on Skype inbound calls, and on their participation with Boingo in offering telephony services (VoIP) from handheld devices or laptops near a WiFi access point. This is going to become very important over the next few years as smartphones with WiFi become more affordable and ubiquitous.
All of the services mentioned implement VoIP through the PC — you plug a microphone or headset into the PC and make your phone calls through the computer. There are some variations on this but that is basically how most of them work. Then I heard about Packet8 from a friend and began using it two years ago. Packet8 utilizes a Broadband Phone Adapter which plugs into your home network. You then plug your cordless or wired phone into the adapter. I had very good results with Packet8 and was especially pleased with the low international rates. My calls to Opera Software in Oslo, Norway, where I am a director, cost just two cents per minute. U.S. “long distance” charges were zero — all covered under the $20 per month plan. During the couple of years of using Pacet8, continued to have a local phone connected to the local phone company because I did not want to change the phone number which I have had for more than twenty years.
I have now made the final plunge with VoIP. Vonage recently began offering Local Number Portability for the area code and exchange where I live. The transition was smooth and automated. Billing is by credit card and the web site allows viewing of all inbound and outbound calls. Vonage is an all-inclusive phone service that not only replaced the local phone company, provides unlimited local and long distance calling anywhere in the US and Canada for one low price, but also provides many nice features as part of the package. Included are Caller ID with Name, Call Waiting and comprehensive voicemail. I particularly like the “simulring” feature which allows you to specify up to six phone numbers to be rung simultaneously with your main number. If I am out of town, an inbound call to either my home or my home-office number will also ring my cell phone. I also like the voicemail feature that sends me an email with a voice attachment for any message. This provides a way to archive a voicemail message or forward it to someone else.
Quality of calls with VoIP has been excellent. It isn’t perfect and a scientific analysis would show that the legacy local phone service has better voice quality. However, I have found it to be more than adequate and no one that I have talked to through Vonage has commented on quality. I have had no problems as the caller either — whether local or to Europe.
One issue to consider is power failures. My broadband service is provided by Comcast. I got an Uninterruptible Power Supply for about $30 to protect both the Linksys cable modem and the Vonage Phone Adapter. All things considered, I am more than pleased with Vonage and would recommend it to anyone that has broadband Internet service. You can literally “cut the cord” with your local phone company and eliminate the words “long distance” from your vocabulary.

Note: I did simple test to determine the difference in time to send information over the Internet between my home in Connecticut and two other places — Florida and New Zealand. The round trip time for four packets, each containing 32 zeroes and ones, from CT to FL was 53 milliseconds. For NZ it was 214 milliseconds. The difference was 161 milliseconds — a little more than 1/8 of a second.