Two of the hottest Internet trends are using your voice to deliver messages and sending your picture at the same time. Voice chat now has hundreds of thousands of users. Video chat is only just starting. Some users gather in public chat rooms for free-form conferences; others conduct private conversations. People have also figured out that chat technology can also save people money on long-distance phone calls and even long-distance video sessions. So many people have started adding computer speakers, microphones, and video chats using the Internet to avoid costly travel and long-distance charges by letting the Internet serve as their eyes, ears, and in some cases, their telephones.
Voice chat blends the sense of personality that comes through a phone conversation with the anonymity of online chat. So, people can still hide behind screen names while enjoying much more personalized interaction. Sending voices over the Internet is not a new development. Internet telephony companies have been converting sound into data packets since the mid-1990s. With the right equipment, you can make a one-to-one call from a personal computer to a telephone, and the other way, or go from phone to phone. To cut costs and without us knowing it, many long-distance phone services now route calls over the Internet by using the same technology as voice chat. Several major phone companies have begun using VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocols - to save money by using the Internet.
VOIP is the technology that makes phoning over the Internet possible. It has been around since the mid-1990s. Initially, only true techies played around with it, thrilled with making free longdistance calls via their computers even though the sound was tinny and there were blizzards of static. In the past two years, the quality has greatly improved, and internet-based phone service has become cheaper and easier to use.
VOIP lets a user hook up a regular telephone to a special adapter. Some services let the user keep their traditional phone number. As an example of how it works, one Florida man, whose family regularly makes calls to his wife's relatives in Costa Rica, uses Vonage, a VOIP company, pays about eight cents a minutes, down from the more than forty cents per minute he used to pay with a traditional phone company.
But to use VOIP you must have high-speed Internet access via DSL or cable. The service does not work well with slow dial-up access. If you have DSL, you must maintain a phone with a local phone company in order to have the high-speed Internet access. If you have Internet access via a cable modem, you can dispense with the phone company altogether. For now, the companies offering Internet phone service are not regulated - a Minnesota judge in 2004 classified Vonage as an information service, not a telecom company - or taxed as traditional phone companies.
So for now, the upside is that no fees or taxes are collected from customers. That means savings for consumers but there is an equally disturbing downside. There are no regulators watching how these companies operate. For instance, bad service problems would have to be worked out with your respective Internet phone-service provider. Another thing worth noting - since Internet phone calls travel via the Internet, not regular phone networks - callers to 911 are not automatically picked up and identified. Several VOIP companies are working with 911 services to route calls to local emergency centers. Remember, too, that the Internet and computers work on electricity; if your power goes out, so does your internet phone service. Remember to have a battery backup.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Greg Walder at 08282010
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