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A recipe for cheap calls

Telephony is set for a radical upheaval when Skype-enabled mobiles and similar devices are launched

BRIGHT FUTURE Mobile phones business is set to boom

We in India might right now be looking a booming mobile phone business, but the future is definitely a lot more exciting.

The Apple iPhone promises to be this year's must-have handset when released in the U.S. in June, but what is making waves right now are Skype-enabled phones.

Norm abroad

With broadband connections a norm abroad now, the whole concept of telephony that we are used to is undergoing a rapid upgrade. Skype, the service offered by Ebay has more or less become the medium for making long-distance calls.

Skype and similar services work on the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). The entire call centre industry runs on the technology.

There was quite a bit of initial scepticism as to whether it would work out for the lay user who makes just a few calls a day, but all that is now passé.

Any household today with a member of the family abroad will be quite familiar with calling over the Internet.

After initial hiccups with voice quality, today VoIP is almost comparable to conventional telephony. The improvement in quality is largely due to the quantum jump we have seen in bandwidths in the last couple of years.

The most obvious benefit of Internet telephony is the cost. Calls are absolutely free if the chatter is between two computers and from a computer to a phone, it can be as low as a rupee a minute.

But the main factor restricting growth of Internet telephony is the fact that you are bound to a computer, but all that is set to change.

High speed access

Public wireless broadband is already a reality abroad and in the next few months quite a number of Indian cities will see either Wi-fi or Wimax being rolled out in phases.

With public wireless broadband, you have high-speed access anywhere and you are free to use your laptop to make calls through VoIP applications. You can either use Skype or any instant messenger that offers voice chatting.

But one does miss the convenience of hand-held mobile phones. You just miss pulling out a contact from the phonebook and dialling. And now a solution is coming for that in the form of mobile phones and separate devices that are VoIP enabled.

The separate devices instead of logging on to a mobile phone network, just tap into the public broadband and depending on what service such as Skype it subscribes to, allows you to make calls from a phonebook that is stored online. Some smart phones and PDA's come with dual access — to mobile phone networks and wireless broadband networks — and have VoIP applications preloaded.

A. S

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