By now everyone has seen those silly commercials on TV for Vonage phone service and their 'unlimited' long-distance calling feature. They display the proverbial shiny red bicycle that us kids just want to buy instantly. But what is behind this immaculate exterior? When something looks to good to be true, is it? To answer these questions and make an intelligent decision we must look into the advantages, disadvantages, and the dirty little details surrounding voip.
Voip is short for voice over internet protocol. In plain English this means making a phone call through the internet using a phone adaptor or voip telephone. This datacom meets telecom technology began coalescing in 1996 and has grown into the voip service industry headed up by such giants as Vonage and Verizon. With the emergence of a whole new genre of communication, there are many advantages. The number one selling point is the cost advantage. It is cheap in comparison to telephone utilities' hefty costs for long-distance calls. The business model is based on the fact that voip is inexpensive. With voip you can get rid of your landline, thus eliminating the cost of having a traditional phoneline in your home or business. With certain software you can also talk to many people at once, swap documents and video back and forth. The web cam capability is also a plus, uniting people and business from any location globally. If you need another impetus to buy in then you can follow along in Ford's footsteps because they have just converted to voip service for its cost effectiveness.
So you save a bunch of cash. In some ways you pay for what you get. So what does your discount deprive you of? There are a plethora of disadvantages of voip. First, to use your new 'phone' the computer and software must be on. Forget the old days of just picking up the phone, now you have to boot up. That spells trouble if you have a seroius emergency. The service provider (ie. Vonage) provides you with the actual phone service, leaving you with the task of providing the broadband internet access. After that you get to install the telephone adaptor which is often problematic. If you opt out of doing this you can buy an expensive voip phone. Once you get your voip going you are confronted with a whole new set of problems. The sound quality is what most people complain about off-hand. There are 3 elements to this; the clarity (fidelity), delay (overlapping of voices), and echo (the Grand Canyon effect). Perhaps the most disturbing disadvantage is the IP address problem. Some emergency services such as 911 do not have the technology to trace an IP address to its originating neighborhood address. In other words, if you have an emergency emergency services will not be able to locate where you are calling from. Also, when you call people, their caller ID will not know what to say either. For instance, when someone calls from a Vonage phone the ID on the other end says 'Vonage'.
The latest gripe is about privacy. Voip is still highly unregulated by the government.. There are not many industry standards put into place yet. CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcements Act) and the 1964 Wiretap Laws keep the government in control of all communications period. So any new kind of communication would be under government scrutiny by default. Because of the IP address isue the FBI would have a hard time tracing calls. They have a general umbrella solution for this. Instead of monitoring one phone line for a police investigation, they can and will, monitor thousands of calls. If they are monitoring thousands of calls they cannnot trace, it is almost random selection and could be you! As far as privacy goes, there have been other recent activities by service providers which has also been questionable. Pudding Media's voip service is free. It is paid for by the advertisers. These advertisers work much like google's gmail ads, finding keywords in the content to match the ads to. So if you are talking about visiting Fiji, travel options to Fiji would pop up as you talk.
You knew that there would be a catch to that pretty shiny exterior. Still though, a savings is a savings. So what is the smart alternative to voip? You could get a free software program like Skype, which allows you to call people that have it for free. Other than that you will have to pick the lesser of two evils, problematic service versus expenive long-distance calling.
http://www.fcc.gov/voip/
http://www.pcworld.com
http://www.voiplobby.com
http://www.technewsworld.com
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