Internet phone can span oceans inexpensively

By Dan Gillmor
Knight Ridder News Service

The phone rang in a Hong Kong apartment where I'm staying while I teach part-time for a month at the University of Hong Kong. The call was from my editor in San Jose, Calif., and the connection was excellent.

Our company incurred no long-distance charges. My editor had dialed a number with a Northern California area code. How did this work?

She reached me on my Internet phone. It uses "voice over Internet Protocol" (VoIP), a method of translating voice into digital data, sending it over the Net and then reconverting it to analog (human-hearable) noise on the other end.

When I arrived at my temporary Hong Kong apartment, which has a high-speed data connection, I had some configuring to do. I plugged in an Internet router to create a mininetwork, then plugged in my computer and a little box that holds the Net-phone circuits. Finally, I plugged the phone — a regular old telephone — into the box.

Presto. I had a fast surfing connection. And I had a phone with which I could make no-charge calls inside the United States — and on which people could call me using my California number.

It gets better. I'm going to buy a stored-value "SIM card" to have a local Hong Kong number for my mobile phone. When I leave the apartment I'll forward the VoIP calls to that number. That will cost extra, because my VoIP phone service will be calling across the ocean — but the cost will only be 5 cents a minute.

There were glitches in setting this all up, some of which were my fault. But that this all works so well is testament to a serious telecommunications shift.

This shift is inexorable because of the nature of technological improvement.

The main questions are a) how soon and b) how the existing phone companies and regulatory agencies will deal with that reality.