[ Wednesday ]
VoIP Savings
Talk Is Cheaper
By Aleksandra Todorova - SmartMoney.com
December 10, 2003
HOW DOES $35 a month for unlimited calls in the U.S. and Canada sound to you? What about making "local" calls (meaning you pay local rates) to your family in, say, New York, when you're staying in Paris?
Welcome to the world of broadband telephony, which over the next decade could revolutionize calling as we know it. Already, it offers some of the cheapest rates ever for long-distance calls — and some cool new services, to boot.
Broadband telephony allows customers to make calls over the Internet using a standard landline phone. Users can call from anywhere in the world, provided they have a broadband Internet connection (sorry, no dial-up). The cost? Depending on the provider, rates for unlimited calls in the U.S. and Canada range from $20 to $35 a month — while dirt-cheap per-minute plans come with fixed monthly service fees as low as $10. The international rates are also better than those offered by any major long-distance provider: 5 cents a minute to most Western European countries, 6 cents to most of Asia.
Intrigued? We're not surprised. While only 150,000 people are using broadband telephony right now (compared with 150 million people using traditional wire line telephones in the U.S.), the voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, industry is growing fast — and analysts have big expectations for the years ahead. "VoIP is the future," says Jon Arnold, a VoIP analyst for Frost & Sullivan, a telecom market research consultancy. "This is what telephony is going to look like in 10 years."
The best news? You don't need to be a computer genius to get started. We know, because we tested three of the biggest services ourselves. Here's what we discovered.
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