2006-03-22 - For cheaper phone bills
Talk to Sinnika Knight about making phone calls over the internet at little or no cost and she can barely contain herself. "I just got so excited," she says. "I told all my friends, 'You've got to do it, it's so fantastic', and they're looking at me like I'm mad."
Finnish-born Knight recently started using an internet telephone service called Skype. With one daughter in Sydney, one in London and other family and friends scattered around the world, paying nothing to stay in touch from her East Brighton, Melbourne, home (beyond the cost of a broadband internet connection) is enormously appealing.
"Because there is also a group call function I'm planning to have calls between old friends in Paris, London and Scotland and me," she says.
And Knight is far from alone in her fascination with the new technology. Skype, the biggest of these new-generation phone service providers, has more than 50 million customers worldwide and is growing at a phenomenal rate. One estimate from analyst Evalueserve reckons Skype could have up to 245 million customers by the end of 2008.
The technology that is making this massive growth possible for Skype and hundreds of smaller competitors - and at the same time sending the chill wind of competition through many established telcos - is voice over internet protocol, or VoIP.
VoIP may be an ugly example of tech-speak, but experts say it has the potential to deliver massive savings to phone users while completely recasting the telecommunications landscape.
VoIP is the method by which voice calls are sent and received over the internet in the same way emails and other data are transmitted. This is radically different from the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN). When a PSTN subscriber places a call, a connection is made with the person on the other end receiving that call. This is known as a circuit-switched network.
In contrast, VoIP is a packet-switched network, meaning it splits the information (in this case a digital representation of your voice) into chunks that are separately routed over the global shared network of the internet and then reassembles them - hopefully in the correct order - at the other end.
So much for the complicated techno-stuff underlying VoIP. The aspect that will excite most phone users is the prospect of slashing phone bills - particularly for overseas calls - by cutting telcos such as Telstra out of the loop.
In many cases, calls around the world can be made free or, depending on the circumstances, for only a fraction of the normal PSTN cost, which is generally calculated depending on the distance between the two parties to the call.
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