Quick Links to Cheap Calling

By Bill Fick

I can place phone calls from Moscow to the continental United States for as little as 10 cents per minute without using a callback service or engaging in calling card fraud.

Cutting-edge Internet applications are fueling a convergence of voice, data and video communication technologies in innovative ways that may mean today's Internet service providers, or ISPs, are tomorrow's telephone companies.

In practical terms, these services offer an array of options, albeit somewhat experimental, to lower the costs of personal and business voice communications in Moscow.

For years, offices with high-volume international telephone traffic have used private data networks to circumvent poor local infrastructure and high long distance prices.

In a classic implementation, a company rents a private data channel to the U.S. which allows them to get a New York dial tone and phone number on several lines in their Moscow office. This private channel can be expensive - thousands of dollars per month - but incoming and outgoing New York calls on lines routed over the channel all become "local," which ultimately saves money when used heavily since the only cost is the flat fee for the private channel and New York local phone service.

The advent of the Internet allows similar principles to be implemented on the shared "public" channel. The global Internet makes a variety of analogous services available to individuals, but does away with the need for expensive private dedicated lines between fixed points.

While regular phone calls over the net still suffer inconsistent performance and static a la ham radio, the price is unbeatable. Equipped with an ordinary PC, microphone, and sound card, I can use the Internet and free software to access a service such as Net2Phone (http://www.net2phone.com) which patches me through to a regular phone line and places an ordinary call originating in the U.S at steeply discounted local rates, billed to my visa card.

The net-to-telephone technology even works on 14.4 and 28.8 kilobit/second dial-up modem connections; the limiting factor tends to be congestion on your ISP's international channel. To try the software and your connection for free, you can use your computer to dial toll free numbers or Net2Phone's own customer service hotline.

Other software avoids the telephone system altogether and enables direct PC to PC voice and video conferencing over the Internet at no cost beyond the charge for the Internet connection.

Two of the most popular packages are CU-SeeMe (http://www.cuseeme.com) and Vocaltec's Internet Phone (http://www.vocaltec.com) both of which can work in voice-only or voice and video modes, if you have a quickcam or other camera attached to your PC. Both are commercial software packages, but free demo copies are available with limited call durations or other restrictions.

Another service called J-Fax (http://www.jfax.com) has exploited advances in digial telephone switching technology and the spread of e-mail to make inexpensive "virtual branch offices" possible in more than 22 cities and area codes around the globe, including New York, London, and other major business centers.

For $12.50 per month you get an individual phone number in any of J-Fax's cities which can receive voice mail and faxes. When a new message or fax arrives, it is instantly and automatically sent to your e-mail address as an attachment, and upon receipt you can listen or print, as appropriate. You can also send faxes to regular fax machines with J-Fax service, complete with graphics, logos, or images from standard Windows documents on a pay-as-you-go basis.

J-Fax does not yet offer virtual offices with Moscow phone numbers, largely because the type of digital telephone service required to provide individual numbers to hundreds or thousands of users via a single switch is still very expensive here, and J-Fax would not be able to maintain their standard $12.50/month fee for private phone numbers.

The potential for a revolutionary shakeout in the telecommunications industry as a result of these technologies should be obvious, and players on the global telecoms market have been looking at just how deeply this developing cheap competition from Internet-based services could cut.

A British company called Phillips Tarifica (http://www.tarifica.com) reported in May, for instance that AT&T stands to lose $350 million in international calls by 2001 as reliability and popularity of Internet telephony continues to increase.

Naturally, the phone companies are not sitting idle. In March 1996 America's Carriers Telecommunications Association (ACTA) filed a petition with the FCC to subject ISPs to the same regulations under which they live. Howls of protest erupted from the Internet community and no decision has yet been reached.

To keep up with both the regulatory issues of Internet telephony and information about the underlying technology, including exhaustive links to software developers and equipment manufacturers, the best online source is the Internet Telephony Consortium based out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at http://itel.mit.edu.