This may sound strange, but you could hire
your cable company to be your telephone company today.
Or you could drop your voice lines and talk
over your DSL broadband line.
Or you could get a new phone number with a
New York or San Francisco area code that rings directly to
your Houston home office.
And these services are available today.
Thanks to technology called Voice Over
Internet Protocol, innovative companies are rewriting the
rule book on what you can do with phone lines, cable TV, the
power lines and even the thin air in your home.
The services are new and sometimes have a
few quirks, but if you are adventurous, want to be more
efficient and would like to save money on monthly bills,
read on.
I've just started testing a service from
Vonage, www.vonage.com, that gives me telephone service on
my high-speed Internet connection. With rates starting as
low as $14.95 a month, it comes with free voice mail, caller
ID with name, call waiting, call forwarding, call transfer
and three-way calling. There's free long-distance for 500
minutes per month to anywhere in the United States or
Canada.
Additional services are available for low
fees. These include unlimited nationwide long-distance, a
phone number with any area code, virtual phone numbers,
toll-free service and transferring your existing phone
number to a new carrier.
The super-size small business package, which
it calls the unlimited plan, costs only $49.95 a month, and
Vonage throws in a free fax line.
Vonage's virtual numbers can be added to the
connection for $5 a month. For example, if you have clients
in New York, you could add a 716 area code number to your
line in Houston. Your customer can then call you from any
phone in that area code toll-free. Neat, huh?
Another advantage comes if you move. Because
of the number portability laws, you can take your phone
number with you and add it to your Vonage account. This
makes it a lot easier on your customers, who might otherwise
lose track after you switch.
Part of the Voice Over Internet Protocol
magic comes from a Motorola's voice terminal that connects
to your broadband service (cable modem or DSL line) and uses
part of the bandwidth to make a phone line.
The terminal has plug-ins for your broadband
line and your phone lines. Setting up the voice terminal was
a simple process with its well-documented instructions.
Once the wires are hooked up, the adapter
self-configures and finds the Vonage servers. If there is a
software update available, it downloads and installs
automatically.
You can then pick up your telephone, hear a
dial tone and dial anyone, anywhere. I must say, it was a
little strange the first few times to pick up the phone.
In my case it was hooked to the cable modem
on my RoadRunner service, and hear a dial tone. For testing,
we hooked up a cordless phone system so we could have
multiple extensions.
This is amazing technology. It boggles my
mind to think that I can now sit with my cordless phone, use
the thin air to communicate to the voice terminal that's
hooked to the cable broadband connection, which turns my
voice into ones and zeros. It then travels over the Internet
to the Vonage server and transfers my voice digits back into
a real voice so I can talk to any phone, anywhere, and have
a clear connection.
Over the next few weeks I'll experiment with
all the features. But, at first blush, this new low-cost
communication system looks like a great tool for a home
office.
