Fire the Phone Company: A Handy Guide to Voice Over IP

Those familiar with business-costs analysis will readily see the savings in terms of time and labor when services such as telephone, fax, and e-mail are converged. Having one way to access all these features allows employees to get more done in less time, saving the business money and increasing its ability to respond quickly to customers.

These same value statements hold true for home use. If you are able to get your online work done more quickly, you will have more time to spend with your family.

• Being able to make calls to the entire soccer team by recording your message once and having it sent to a list of phone numbers could save the busy soccer coach more than half an hour of making calls.

• Receiving an e-mail notification of a voice-mail message at work lets you know that someone attempted to reach you at home.

• Listening to your voice mail online allows you to know that this evening's committee meeting has been cancelled and you can go straight home after work.

Integrated messaging

Many VoIP services allow you to integrate e-mail and voice mail. You can receive notifications of voice-mail messages and listen to them online. Services like Free World Dialup offer integration with instant-messaging clients from Microsoft, Yahoo!, and America Online (AOL), as well as their own messaging tools. This helps users know when others are online and allows them to choose voice or text, depending on their circumstances.

Instant-Messaging Clients

Microsoft Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger now have the ability to make and receive Internet calls between messaging subscribers. Yahoo! even uses technology provided by Net2Phone to allow users to call standard telephone numbers.

With these clients, you can make voice and video calls, chat, send e-mail, and search for new contacts, all within one application. For those who primarily use computers when communicating, these tools offer great value.

Initiatives by Major Online Services

Some mega Internet access providers like AOL now offer Internet phone service. This service offers the same features discussed in earlier chapters plus integration with AOL's other services.

AOL Internet Phone allows you to make and receive calls with a regular telephone. The service also offers features such as the ability to call people from your AOL contacts list, listen and respond to e-mails by phone, and receive e-mail notification of voice-mail messages.

Contact list integration

Some VoIP services offer the ability to retrieve contacts from Microsoft Outlook or other e-mail programs and to initiate calls to one of more contacts at the same time (Figure 8.2). You can send a message to all your friends by selecting their numbers from your contacts list. This saves you the time required to look up all those numbers and eliminates misdialing.

Fax over Internet

For about $10 per month, you can add a fax line to your VoIP service to send and receive fax messages from your home. For a small home business, this saves more than $20 per month in dedicated line charges, in addition to long-distance savings. Fax over Internet uses the G.711 codec to ensure good call quality. The service typically can use the second port in your TA (telephone adapter) to connect the fax machine so that you don't need additional telephone hardware. (You still need a fax machine, though.)

Multimedia communications

As VoIP services evolve, users are discovering new ways to communicate. Imagine a conference call in which you can also send instant messages to other callers to discuss strategy as the call progresses. You can also participate in calls where some participants use video and others use voice, depending on their equipment and their location (Figure 8.3).

Some softphone services, such as ineen.com, are using softphones to send and receive video, too (Figure 8.4).