Previously I mentioned the cost benefits of my VOIP phone service. While that's the main driver for many users, there's a lot more to be excited about. VOIP is far more flexible than your traditional phone service because it's entirely computer based, making it easy for the provider to add intelligence to the system. It's really just a matter of software.
Systems become simpler as complexity moves from the edges of the network, where it has to be managed by the user, to the centre, where it's managed by the system. VOIP does exactly that.
A simple example is the speed dial list. With a traditional phone service you store this in the handset, at the edge of the network. If you have multiple handsets, you have to program the numbers into each one. VOIP moves the speed dial list to the centre, where you configure it via a web page. That's a far more user friendly interface for programming speed dial numbers than a handset, but the real benefit is that it's accessible immediately from any handset connected to your service.
A more profound example is number portability. In a traditional phone system your phone number is associated with your house or office, at the edge of the network, or at best with the local exchange, meaning you can only keep your number if you move locally. You and your friends are left to manage the complexity when you move and are assigned a new number. Contrast this with the experience of my wife's cousin when he recently moved from northern Virginia to Los Angeles. Because his phone service is VOIP his number hasn't changed. People will call him who don't even know he's moved. The system manages the complexity - it worries about routing the call to his physical location.
With VOIP area codes and country codes become meaningless, both because you can take them anywhere and because VOIP is driving call charges towards their real costs, which for several decades have largely been independent of time or distance. We are moving to a world where a phone number is just a number. It needs to be unique, it needs to be associated with you, but beyond that it doesn't mean anything. In fact, that's a standard simplifying strategy in information systems design (but something I still have to explain to clients on a regular basis).
Another example I really love on my current service (Lingo) is the voicemail to email feature. When you leave me a voicemail it is automatically sent to me as an email with a sound file attached. There's actually several benefits compared to the way voicemail traditionally works.
First, it's push rather than pull i.e. it tells me there's a voicemail rather than me having to remember to check. OK my cell phone displays a text message when I receive a voicemail, but then I've still got to dial in and navigate a time consuming menu to listen to it (if you were the suspicious type, you'd think Verizon were intentionally trying to force me to chew up my free minutes. I am and I do).
Second, it can send multiple notifications. Mine is configured to forward not only to my personal email but also to my work email as well as my wife's email. If I wanted I could easily have it send me a text message on my cell phone as well.
Third, it's free to retrieve my email regardless of where I am. Sure I can still check traditional voicemail when I'm in Australia or Morocco or France or wherever by dialing in, but then I'd have to make an international call and I certainly can't receive any notification messages.
What's stopping the traditional phone companies from providing similar capabilities? These days, other than the "last mile" between the local exchange and your house, their networks have largely been upgraded to use the same technologies as the VOIP carriers have, so the obstacles are not primarily technical.
The real problem is that they have a powerful vested interest in protecting the old model. Their dirty little secret is that they have been screwing us on long distance and international call costs for years. If you don't beleive your current traditional carrier is overcharging you, think about this. My $19.95 a month plan allowed my wife to call me while I was in Paris at no additional charge - that's right it was included in the plan. Think about that. Unlimited calling to the US, Canada and Europe! For less than twenty bucks I can't even get a basic local service from Qwest.
If I spent every minute of every hour of every day for a month on the phone to France that would work out at 5 hundredths of a cent a minute. Now go ask your carrier why they want to charge you 50 cents or a dollar a minute to call Europe. Or even 5 cents a minute for long distance within the US. That's still a hundred times more than I'm paying.
Of course politicians have long conspired in this so they can force the phone companies to subsidise favored interest groups, in this case those in rural areas who pay much less than the real cost of their phone service. You may think it's a good thing to ensure they don't pay any more than you for their phone. But don't kid yourself about how this works. The phone companies are not the ones paying for it, you are! Remember, when politicians buy votes, they always do it with our money.
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