voip!

one of the useless things i’ve been pondering recently: voip, or voice over ip. basically, it’s using the internet for telephony, so you get a telephone number that you can call using a regular phone, but it actually uses tcpip to ring a phone connected through your dsl or cable modem or whatever. it’s been around for a while, mostly at the corporate level, but now it’s really making inroads and looks to be viable for the consumer market.

the big player in this seems to be vonage, who is already offering service that you hook up through your broadband connection, with QoS (quality of service) to ensure that your porn downloading doesn’t mess up your sex chat line phone calls at the same time. $35/month for flat rate service nationwide and canada, compared to like $75 for comparable service through the phone company. or $25/month + 500 minutes of long distance. plus free features like call waiting, caller id, voice mail, etc. and due to the recent telephone portability act, they can even transfer your phone so you can keep your number.

very tempting, although i guess still in theory for now. because they don’t yet support my area for keeping my number, which is nostalgically important to me. i guess it’s just as well, preventing me from mucking things up for no good reason.

it’s also interesting because the fcc is still trying to figure out what to do with it, and if they want (and how) to regulate it. who knows? you could sign up for this and then they could impose regulations and really mess things up.