Telecommunication in the 21st Century

Prior to 1984 if you wanted to talk with somebody other than face-to-face you had only one choice. AT&T was the name of the only game in town. Whether at home, in the office, or on a pay phone you and the person you were calling, if they were in the United States, were using AT&T's service. Competition was unheard of. Rates were high, especially for long distance calls. Most homes had a single line which meant if your older sister was on the phone with her boyfriend for hours at a time you were left incommunicado. Call waiting, caller ID, and voice mail didn't exist.

Let's say you were out on the town and your car broke down. To call your wife to ask her to come pick you up fIrst, you'd have to find a pay phone and hope you had change. No change? That's okay, dial zero for the operator and for a large fee they could place a collect call for you which meant that when your wife answered the phone the operator would ask her if she'd accept the charges. If she agreed your home phone bill would be charged for the convenience. If the line were busy you could tell the operator it was an emergency and ask her (operators were almost always women) to interrupt the conversation. Yet another fee.

In 1984 the Supreme Court broke up AT&T and set the stage for competition. Over time long distance and local phone service competition materialized. Innovative new features became available---call waiting, caller ID, *69 (call return), voice mail, call forwarding. Then in the 1990s cell phones start to gain popularity. They were bulky, expensive to buy and expensive to use. Call quality ranged from poor to mediocre and coverage was spotty. Dropped calls were common.

Fast forward to today. Cell phone service is getting cheaper. Coverage is better. Call quality rivals the best land-line service. Many people are dropping their home phone and relying on exclusively on their mobile phone. It's even possible to transfer that home phone number you've had for years to a cell phone account. Cell phones have killed pay phones --- when was the last time you saw a phone booth on a street corner? And now they're making the home phone a thing of the past.

The next big thing in telecommunication is VOIP---Voice Over IP--- which allows the Internet to carry your phone conversations. Services like Skype, Gizmo5, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, just to name a few, are being used by millions of people. They all allow people to make computer-to-computer voice calls and computer to telephone calls---land line or cell phone. Other advantages of these new VOIP servers are the ability to have multiple phone numbers on one account. You're in Seattle, your mom is in New York, you're thinking about moving to Miami? No problem, you can get numbers in each city all ringing to your same VOIP account. Each of these services allow you to forgo phone numbers completely for computer-to-computer calls. Just find your buddy's screen name, click, and call.

So VOIP is cool but what if you're not at your computer? There are several options available. Small boxes are available that you can connect to your home Internet connection and plug in a regular old phone. You pick up the phone, get dial tone, and make a call like you've always done. And when somebody calls you on your VOIP account the phone rings. Soon you'll forget that the phone on your desk is connected to the Internet and not the phone company.

Most VOIP services allow you to forward your incoming calls to another phone for when you're away from your PC. Voice mail is a common option as well. Often you're able to receive your voicemail messages in your email inbox.

Land line service is on its way out, being replaced by cell phones, and VOIP. Will VOIP now do away with cell phone service? WiFi Internet connections are becoming more and more ubiquitous. Most homes have them, coffee shops, shopping malls and now some cities are blanketing neighborhoods with free WiFi. Even airlines are starting to offer in-flight WiFi Internet connections. With a WiFi VOIP phone, a handheld computer or laptop coupled WiFi wherever you go you can use the VOIP service(s) of your choice over the device of your choice just about anywhere in the world! No international roaming. Whether in a cafe in Buenos Aires or a Starbucks in New York City you'll be able to make and receive calls with equal ease.

The future of voice communications is quickly becoming reality. Free or very inexpensive calls from anywhere to anywhere worldwide.