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Calls
Over Internet
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Making
phone calls online can save you big money and is easier ever. But
how does it sound?
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When I told a friend I was making
phone calls over the Internet he chuckled urbanely, sat me down
in a comfy chair and gently explained that no, you get the Internet
over your phone, not the other way round, and for God’s
sake, would I please try to pull myself together? He was wrong,
of course. Internet phone service is very real, and newfangled
as it sounds, it has one very old-fashioned virtue: it’
cheap.
It’s not even that newfangled. Companies like Net2phone
and Dial Pad have been selling Internet phone service for years.
But it hasn’t caught on for a variety of reasons: it can
be tricky to use, some services require exotic hardware, and
the audio quality is iffy at best-most Internet phone on Mars.
But that’s changing. There’s new technology called
Session Initiation Protocol that handles Internet phone calls
more efficiently, making them less expensive and more hi-fi.
Last week I decided to give it a chance. |
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| I signed up for a new Internet phone service
called Vonage, which costs $40 a month for unlimited local and long-distance
calling (plus a one-time $25 setup fee). The average American phone
bill is $55, so that’s a pretty good deal, even factoring in
the cost of a broadband Internet connection, which is required. You
sign up online at www.vonage.com,
and they send you a sinister-looking box the size of a large ashtray. |
Hook your cable modem or DSL line
up to one end of the box, plug any ordinary phone into the other
end, and you’re ready to go. No PC required. (If you want
to share your connection with a PC, as most people will, you’ll
need to run it through a router. Vonage sells one for $25: the
setup is a little more involved, but it’s still not brain
surgery.)
Once the service is up and running, you quickly forget you’re
talking over the Internet. Really, Pick up the phone, and you
hear a regular old dial tone, and anyone calling you will hear
the usual ringing noise. The sound quality is crisp and clear.
I won’t say it’s perfect-there’s slightly hollow,
tinny quality-but unless you’re planning to listen to Mahler’s
Fifth over the phone, it’s no big deal. And there are other
perks besides the price. At Vonage’s website you can access
a list of your last 10 calls, both incoming and outgoing. You
can set your phone to forward calls to any other number, and
you can even check voice mail online. Oh, and get this: for
your new phone number, you get a choice of area codes.
Drawbacks? For arcane technical reasons, you can’t call
emergency services. Also, I found that “Guess what? I’m
calling from the Internet!” isn’t the dazzling conversation
opener I thought it would be. Otherwise, I’m sold. In the
year to come, most cable, broadband and phone companies will
start adding Internet Telephone service to their standard packages,
and when they do, it’s going to get even cheaper. The future
is calling, and it’s not collect.
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Air
Apparent
That the new sony vaio wireless
LAN works a lot like apple’s Airport shouldn’t
be a surprise. After all, the two companies have taken
cues from each other for years. But you don’t just
hook up to the Internet with the Vaio LAN. You can also
stream content such as DVDs- meaning you can watch movies
on multiple PCs by sharing a single disc. Cost: $ 400
for the base station and $ 135 per wireless PC card.
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Now
your dog can bark out
some E- mail
By Kay Itoi
You are in a meeting in Osaka, hundreds
of miles from your home in Tokyo. Suddenly an e-mail
message on your mobile phone signals trouble: a burglar
has broken in. You call the Tokyo police, and hey arrive
just in time to catch the intruder. But who, they ask,
tipped you off? It was Taro, your best friend, who was
minding the house while you were gone. This explanation
would be unremarkable except that Taro happens to be
a dachshund. When the burglar broke in, Taro did what
any watchdog would do: he barked. What happened next
is the brainchild of Matsumi Suzuki, President of Japan
Acoustic lab in Tokyo. He invented a wireless gadget
that hangs around the dog’s neck. It analyzes the
bark and determines whether the dog is experiencing
“ frustration, insistence, happiness, sorrow, desire,
or menace.” If it’s menace,” the gadget
could send out the e-mail warning. Suzuki got the idea
for “ Bowlingual” while analyzing human speech
for law- enforcement and news organizations. An animal
lover, he began analyzing hundreds of dogs, and found
consistent voiceprint patterns that corresponded to
discrete moods, regardless of the breed of dog. Tokyo
Toymaker Takara will market the device in June 2002
for 14,800 yen ($ 111).
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