My Favorite Techie

One of the technologies that I have been watching is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. This service basically allows phone calls to be made inexpensively over the Internet. We’ve seen all kinds of service providers pop up over the last few years that have very low rates such as Vonage and VoIPo. But one would still continue to wonder why we would continue to need home phone service even via the Internet when many of us are mobile. The interesting thing is that many of these services have the ability to be mated to an app on our smartphones that would allow us to receive calls using the Internet connection on our smartphone devices.

One of the advantages of using a VoIP service on our mobile devices is that we would NOT be using precious minutes to call land lines. Those phone calls would be part of the flat fee for the VoIP service. The unfortunate thing is that data consumption on our phones would skyrocket. This technology becomes a great benefit for businesses of all sizes. We now have the ability to take our office phone with us worldwide rather than having to play games with transferring calls to and from cell lines to office lines.

If one is a geek, there is an Open Source IP PBX solution called Asterisk by Digium that offers a full-featured IP PBX for FREE. The most popular distribution of that package is Trixbox CE. One can set it up for a two person office or for an office of 100 or more. All that is needed is a relatively still usable computer Pentium III or better, a few IP phone devices or softphone software, and VoIP service with at least one phone number. (The software will also work without external service.) The software runs on a Linux kernel and will self-install for the most part. There is better configuration when done via command prompt.

Down the road, I definitely see VoIP becoming the major player in our daily voice communications as mobile Internet access gets faster and faster. In fact, I begin to wonder if cell service as we know it know will migrate over just as business voice service has begun switching.