The good news is that Internet phoning has come a long way since its mid-’90s inception. Consumer services like Net2Phone and Dialpad have responded to customer complaints, fixing old problems and adding new, better products. Voice quality is up. And though the services are no longer free, they can really save you some bucks, particularly if you make frequent international calls.
In order for your voice to travel over the Net as e-mail does, it must be converted from an analog to a digital signal, then broken into small envelopes of data called Internet Protocol packets. Voice processed in this way is what’s known as voice over IP. Users of the early versions of PC-to-phone services complained that talking through a computer was difficult to set up, required software downloads that sometimes didn’t work and produced an unpleasant echo effect that, according to one user, sounded like “a cross between crickets and sleigh bells.”
Steve Gottschalk is a typical user from the early days of the Dialpad service, back in 1999. He was pleased with voice quality (not much static, not too much lag) but says he found it “too confining” to sit at his PC and chat through a headset with a microphone. “I’m not very good at sitting still when I’m talking on the phone,” says the 45-year-old Connecticut resident. Gottschalk also found that running the phone software ate up too much RAM for him to use other programs at the same time. “We realized that the PC is not the best interface to make a phone call,” says Howie Balter, CEO of Newark, N.J.-based Net2Phone, the other big PC-to-phone service provider.
In response, Dialpad and Net2Phone introduced alternatives. Both companies now offer calling cards that let you place IP calls over a regular phone using a special access code. Both have also partnered with hardware makers to create IP telephones as well as devices that allow you to attach a regular phone to a cable modem for Internet calling. (We tried a Dialpad IP calling card and found the voice quality only slightly less crisp than on a regular connection.)
The savings can be deep, though more for international than domestic calls. AT&T, for example, charges 31 cents a minute to Russia from anywhere in the United States. Using Net2Phone, you can reach Moscow for just six cents a minute if a PC is used to place the call. If you’re using the company’s phone-to-phone calling card, it costs 13 cents a minute. Gavin Cowie, a traveling Web consultant from Scotland, says Net2Phone rates from Helsinki back to his homeland were five times cheaper than the local options. This is why Internet calling has acquired a loyal, if small, fan base. According to the companies, these services today are largely used by immigrants, overseas military personnel and strapped college students.
So what about the rest of us? Industry experts say you may already have experienced VOIP without even realizing it. This is because long-distance carriers-AT&T and Sprint, for example–are gradually replacing their old circuit-switched networks with IP-based trunks, especially for overseas calls. Let’s say you’re calling from New York to Bolivia. “Somewhere in the network, you might find a VOIP circuit–say, in La Paz–and then the call would terminate at the local phone company,” says Joe Aibinder of AT&T. “That could happen today and you wouldn’t even know it.”
The sound quality of VOIP offered by the likes of AT&T is good in part because the carrier does not route its calls over the public Internet, which is prone to surges of traffic that can erode a voice transmission. Protected, secure and privately managed channels of the Internet backbone are used instead. This high-quality setup is typical of telco and cable-company VOIP services that will start to trickle into the consumer marketplace. David Horoschak, senior IP-telephony product manager for Motorola, says that many of the major cable-TV companies are currently testing voice services for their broadband customers in a dozen cities across the country. These voice services, which use Motorola-made devices to channel the broadband feed into a telephone, could become reality as early as the end of the year. So long, Ma Bell. Hello, Comcast?
Proponents say this kind of “convergence” (that old buzzword) of voice with data would allow companies to provide browserlike interfaces for your phone-calling needs. Instead of pushing a lot of buttons to transfer a call, for example, you could just click a name on a screen. Don’t bother objecting, because experts agree the move to IP is inevitable. It’s cheaper and more flexible than today’s legacy networks. “This transition is a 20-year process, and we’re at year five,” says telecom analyst Mark Winther. We’ve come a long way from two cans and a piece of string.
