You have to wonder why mobile phones have evolved so quickly, yet standard phones have remained so static. The archaic concept of remembering 10 digits numbers for every one of your friends is just ridiculous. Mobile phones have had address books built into them for years now. You just go through a list, select the person’s name, and it dials. There are very few standard phones that will do this. And the very few that do have an incredibly obtuse way of entering numbers and names. (Up until the Blackberries and iPhones came along, mobile phones suffered from the same issues) Doesn’t it just make sense to enter all your contacts on your computer and have it sync with your phone, like (some) mobile phones do now? I find it astonishing that not a single company has released a regular telephone with a graphic display that syncs to a computer address book. Or even better, why hasn’t the phone system adapted to personal name aliases, like MSN or other chat systems? Why would I want to remember 613-555-7274 when I can remember “hockeyfan1″ instead? On top of the ancient 10-digit number issue, there’s call display, and availability technologies that could easily be implemented into phone technology. Imagine if you could see if your friend was “available” before calling them? Seeing a person’s status could be very valuable in a number of situations. If I had to call a friend to talk about last night’s hockey game, but I can see that his status is “in a meeting”, I probably won’t call. But if I was calling to tell him his wife is having her baby, I would probably interrupt the meeting. This allows the caller to take responsibility of call importance instead of everyone just randomly calling everyone else and having the callee guess on what the caller is going to talk about and how important it is. And finally, there’s the whole issue of “long distance” to begin with. We live in an increasingly mobile world, where we are traveling, moving, or in transit all the time. Why should we have to keep changing our number? People should be accessible without geographical locations… numbers should be assigned to people not to locations. If I want to call George, I don’t care if he’s in Toronto, or Vancouver, or Texas. I just want to reach him.

Thanks to the rising popularity of VOIP, some of these issues are being addressed. Voice Over IP allows you leverage your high speed internet to make regular phone calls to other VOIP owners as well as old-skool Bell phone lines. Because it’s using the internet to make calls, it can bypass the long distance costs entirely. In simple terms, you make a call from your phone to someone anywhere in North America, it goes through the internet to a calling station in the area your calling to and makes a local call. And your number travels with you, because VOIP doesn’t know where you are, it just knows who you are. So if you have an Ottawa VOIP number, and you bring your VOIP adapter to Vancouver with you, people who call the Ottawa number still reach you in Vancouver with no long distance charges. Calls made outside North America are incredibly cheap in long distance costs compared to Bell… just pennies on the dollar.

Sounds cool doesn’t it? It is! And it gets even cooler. Skype has come into the market with a slew of unique features that are set to take over the telecommunications industry if they can iron out the kinks and gain real mainstream acceptance. In order to understand the concept of Skype, you have to think about it in terms of its versatility and forward-thinking ideas. In essence, it’s like a cross between an instant messenger (like MSN) mixed with a phone service. If you have friends on Skype, you can call them by “dialing” their screen name, or if they are in your contacts you can just select their name and it will call them. If you’re doing this on your computer, you can also send them files, text messages, or open a video window and have a video chat. Did I mention this is all free? Yes, free… Anywhere in the world. You can Skype call your colleagues in Australia and talk to them for free. And for a minimal fee ($3 a month), you can call non-Skype users (regular phone numbers) as well. And for another minimal fee (under $3 a month) you can get a traditional phone number so non-Skype users can call you from their regular phone. And as if all that wasn’t awesome enough, they have started offering computer-less devices that connect to the Skype network. So all you need is this normal-looking cordless phone and you can access Skype and all the features I mentioned above. Yes, it has a graphical display, and it shows your contacts, who is available/busy/offline, as well as your address book contacts. You simply scroll through the list, select the name you want, and the call is made, all from a regular handset.

If that sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is… for now. There are minor glitches and availability issues that are causing this almost perfect Skype solution to be inaccessible to the majority of users. Caller ID is a little flaky at the moment. If everyone had Skype, this would not be an issue, as they would be in your contacts and go through the Skype network entirely. But when you mix in VOIP caller ID, Bell caller ID, and a multitude of others, it can get a little confused. Remember what I said about digital convergence and all the competing companies not playing nice with each other? This is what I was talking about. Even worse, Skype does not offer local phone numbers in all areas (you cannot get a local number in Canada at this time). Again, if everyone had Skype it would not be an issue, because you would be calling their Skype ID, not their “local phone number”.

Out of all the telecommunications technologies out there, Skype seems to be the most promising. It could revolutionize the whole industry if it could capitalize on its strengths and market itself properly. Imagine being able to call people instead of area-based numbers. Imagine being able to know if your friends are available before you call them. Imagine being able to keep your ID no matter where you are in the world. Imagine being able to select your friends from a list instead of having to dial a number. That’s the future of telecommunications. We just need to wait for all the pieces to fall into place.

Don’t feel like waiting? In part 2 of my article, I’m going to explain Skype in greater depth, and give you a real example and full walk-through on how you can have this entire solution right now. My Skype devices are being shipped to me as we speak and all my services have been setup and working well for the past couple of days. I hope some of you consider this elegant and cheap (under $17 a month) solution for your telephone service. The more people who try the Skype solution, the more the solution becomes a viable alternative. The future is in your hands.

Until the next article,

Andy

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Tags: a7, bell, canada, future, mobile, number, phone, skype, skypein, technology, telecommunications, telephony, voip

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