I COULD BE ANYWHERE - I'm a foreign correspondent. Last month I was in Stockholm, Sweden. Now I'm in Frankfurt, Germany. Next month, who knows?
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Three-part series from The Associated Press
Voice-over-Internet: The New Telephony
Associated Press
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You certainly won't if I call you from my laptop computer, which I'm doing more often these days using something called Skype.
It's become my preferred phone service as I'm forever calling across countries and oceans - trying, meanwhile, to keep costs down.
There's a rather savory irony to all this.
The countries I've been working in have among the world's highest densities of mobile phones, yet I use the Internet for most all my phone calls, business and personal.
Skype lets me call any phone number anywhere in the world for about 2 cents a minute, slightly more to some places, such as the Middle East and Asia. My computer does the dialing, and the processing of incoming and outgoing voices.
All you need to use Skype and products like it - FreeWorld Dialup is another popular one - is a solid broadband connection (fixed or Wi-Fi).
With the basic version of Skype, all anyone needs to make or receive a call is to install the program on their computer (and that includes personal digital assistants). All calls are free.
You don't even need a headset, though earphones can be a good idea if you wish to be discreet. I use my laptop's built-in microphone and onboard speakers for voice in/out.
The paid service for calling regular telephones is called SkypeOut and is fairly simple. I buy time in chunks of euro10 euros, or about $13. Skype works on Windows, Mac, Linux, even PocketPCs.
When my wife was in Florida it cost me about $8 to speak to her for about 30 minutes on a landline from Sweden. Had I used the mobile the same call would have cost about six times as much. The price with Skype: less a dollar.
The quality is crystal clear, provided there's not too much traffic on the Internet. If there's an echo: hang up and try again, it usually gets better.
One warning though: On some computers, especially those running older versions of Windows, it doesn't always work, or can sound like a garbled conversation carried out under water with a giant whale slapping its tail nearby. You don't hear a thing.
Until he got Skype, a Brazil-based colleague of mine, Al Clendenning, was spending between $166 to $185 a month to keep in touch with family in Spain, New Hampshire and elsewhere. No longer. He and his wife do experience occasional glitches, though that may be related to the quality of the broadband connection. Another colleague's wife, a Peruvian living in New York, gave up on using Skype's free version to chat with a friend in Lima after the friend's broadband connection proved unreliable.
Skype was invented by many of the same people who created the Kazaa file-swapping program: chiefly a Swede named Niklas Zennstrom and a bunch of programmers in Estonia. Like Kazaa, peer-to-peer networking is at its core.
These guys are into disruptive technologies. So am I.
I'm relishing turning my friends on to the joys of Internet dialing. I called a college pal who's living in Hoboken, N.J. on a weekend afternoon and we chatted for nearly an hour.
"It's clear," he said, and was surprised when I told him it was a Voice over Internet connection.
He's installed it on his Mac and is getting his friends to start using it, too.
Even Dear Old Mom in Colorado uses Skype, but only at home. Her company doesn't allow it at work, citing security concerns my mother attributes to overzealous techies.
Skype does have one big drawback.
Unlike other more feature-rich Voice over Internet services, it doesn't give me a phone number of my own unless I want to pay an extra euro30 a year (for a service called SkypeIn that's still in testing).
And of course Internet access is not always available. Which is why I still carry my trusty cell phone.
Sometimes, the mobile phone company actually wins.
On the Net:
Skype: http://www.skype.com
FreeWorld Dialup: http://www.pulver.com/fwd
