Loading ...VOIP, Skype, and Cell Phones?
Voice Over IP (VOIP), the technology that lets you use your internet connection to make and receive phone calls (with a regular telephone, not just your computer), seems to be expanding its reach daily. Many of the big telecom companies have been adopting it, or imitations of it in the hope of staving off more customers leaving landlines in even higher numbers. Many younger people have been abandoning landlines since cell phones are now almost required in our society today. At most, a landline may be kept for the purposes of a broadband DSL connection, but with cable broadband, landlines aren’t a necessity even for those who need such connections. But cell phones often have reception issues and the pricing structure means that one often has to be careful not to make too many calls between 7am and 9pm on weekdays, when calls are usually metered. Per minute charges over your monthly allotment can very quickly skyrocket.
That’s why VOIP makes an excellent supplement for some. The cost, especially if not using one of the large telecoms’ VOIP services, can be quite inexpensive. For example, I pay $20/month for my Broadvoice line that gives me unlimited local and long distance here in the US, and even international calls to 21 different countries. Additionally, all the other services that you normally have to pay for like call waiting, *69, voicemail, etc., are free with most VOIP services. But there’s a lot more functionality offered free than phone companies offer period. For example, many of these services allow you to go to a webpage where you can listen to your voicemail online. Even better, I’ve set my account to send me an email everyone someone calls my VOIP number. It also sends me an email when someone leaves a voicemail, and actually attaches that message as a sound file which I can play on my computer or on my Treo 650 (which I also check my email with).
Don’t get me wrong, VOIP is still not flawless by any means. There are lots of quality issues. I’ve been dealing with them myself for many months. Even after I increased my bandwidth (a common reason for poor voice quality is insufficient bandwidth), I continue to have problems.
The other problem that VOIP has is that, well, it isn’t a cell phone! You can’t take it with you and talk while you’re at the beach, driving in the car, etc. It does have some portability in that you can take your VOIP “adapter” (or a VOIP Wifi Phone) with you anywhere that you can get access to a fast internet connection and use it there. The adapter usually needs a hard-wired Ethernet connection whereas the Wifi Phone, as you would guess, is meant to pick up Wifi signals. But of course, these connections are not nearly as ubiquitous as cell-phone networks – at least not yet and probably not for a decade or more.
There’s yet another option out there which is kind of a cross between VOIP and the old internet voice conferencing applications like NetMeeting. “Skype” has become a real phenomenon among lots of bloggers, podcasters and geeks in general. The voice quality is not only supposed to match a regular telephone line, but with broadband speeds to actually surpass it by quite a bit! It provides voicemail, conference calling, and many of the features you would want out of a telephony product. The only problem is that at least for the time being you have to use a computer in order to make calls. You can’t use a real phone. Aside from this, it seems to be a great product except that the pricing structure is very different from VOIP. To call other users on their computers, it’s free, but if you want to be able to call people on their landline phones or cell phones, you will have to get the premium “SkypeOut” and then you will incur a $.01 to $.04 charge per minute give or take, depending on what country you call. For the U.S., the charge is $.026, which would give me about 770 minutes for the same $20 that I pay my VOIP provider for unlimited calls (I rarely call internationally). Depending on your call volume this may or may not make sense, but just remember that at least for now you’ll be chained to your computer.
Of course the ultimate in convergence here would be a cell phone (in particular a smartphone) which would also be able to use one of these internet telephony services, and thereby avoid some of the pricing weirdness of mobile phone plans. Microsoft has built in VOIP over Wifi functionality into their newest Windows Mobile 5. Vonage, probably the best known and perhaps oldest VOIP provider already offers a version of their software that works with Windows Mobile devices, including smartphones. Skype has also has a version for Windows Mobile Devices. So what about the large contingent of Pa1mOne Treo 600 and Treo 650 users - a number that might dwarf the number of Windows Mobile Phone users? Well, unfortunately, Skype has said that they have no plans to make a version of their software for PalmOS. Vonage, it seems, has been investigating a PalmOS version, but apparently it’s harder than it looks, but unlike Skype it seems they are still trying to struggle through these difficulties. They suggest they will probably offer a PalmOS version this year. The only question is, will it be for the current Treos or will it only be for more powerful Tungsten or LifeDrive units, or even a future, more powerful Treo that hasn’t been announced yet? While the Treo 650 was indeed an improvement over its predecessor in many ways, it is still lags behind in processor power to Windows Mobile phones that came out a year ago or more. Likewise, the battery power still does not seem to be adequate to power an SD Wifi card, something that Windows Mobile phones have been able to do for years – heck they’ve even had Wifi built into some of them. Enfora will soon be releasing a Wifi “Sled” which solves the problem in a unique way, so perhaps at some point there will be a VOIP sled, if indeed battery power is one of the constraining issues. One issue that is definitely a constraint is the actual data throughput of these services. Certainly the older GRPS data networks will not be able to handle these calls, and even the 2.5G EDGE may not. It’s very possible that you will need to have either a CDMA/EVDO phone, or if you need a GSM phone than you will have to wait for the 3.5G HSDPA Networks to be built out, something that probably won’t start appearing in any significant number for at least another year, maybe two or three.
I think the main benefit that will come out of all these technologies converging will be to drive prices down even more, and, one would hope, to increase the overall voice quality. This hasn’t necessarily been true so far, but with bandwidth expanding and these technologies maturing, within the next few years I see at least on the higher end a move to a single device (a smartphone) with which you can subscribe to cell phone service, but which you can also subscribe to VOIP or Skype using that same cell network or whatever Wifi network you can attach to. Eventually Wimax may come in and we’ll have yet another potential convergence between cellular networks and Wifi networks, but that’s another story and probably one that’s at least five years out!