TECHNOLOGY: COMMUNICATION

Latinos with family, friends and business associates across the country—or in Mexico, the Caribbean and points south—often have the urge to reach out and touch someone. But many don’t pick up the phone because of those painful long-distance charges. Suddenly, it’s all so painless.

The Internet—specifically, Internet over a broadband connection—is reinventing how we use phones and what they can do for us. And it’s so much cheaper.

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, turns the caller’s voice into data and sends it over the Internet like e-mail—then switches it back into voice. According to Katherine Bagin, marketing VP at AT&T’s Internet telephony division, “Projections show that over the next four years more than 50 percent of U.S. households will have broadband. VoIP will ride that growth.” Hispanics with far-flung relations and acquaintances would do well to sift through the new choices for staying in touch.

YOU MEAN IT’S FREE?

A radical example is a Luxembourg-based system (recently acquired by eBay) called Skype, which lets you converse over the Internet absolutely free with loved ones from Miami to L.A., from Madrid to Lima to Mexico City—if they download Skype software and have a microphone and speakers on their computers. If they don’t, SkypeOut lets users call over the Internet to ordinary land-line telephones anywhere for a very modest fee. Free talk over the Internet is also available from Google Talk, Yahoo’s Messenger with Voice, and AOL’s Internet phone service. The most serious change in the way we converse on the phone—no, not with a microphone or messaging or voice e-mail but with a real phone—began some three years ago when a tiny startup called Vonage spearheaded the VoIP movement in the United States. It now serves more than 800,000 subscribers.

WEIGHING IN

Once Vonage hit the mother lode, the gold rush was on. Numerous competitors like Lingo, Packet8, iOnosphere, and VoiceEclipse set up in business; today there are nearly a thousand. The traditional heavyweights saw the future of telephony slipping away and weighed in with their own products. Entries including AT&T’s CallVantage, Verizon VoiceWing and Qwest OneFlex put their imprimatur on the whole VoIP process.

Of course, traditional telcos might conceivably try to defend their turf by lobbying for government regulation of online telephony.Columbia University law professor Timothy Wu told the Washington Post: “There are people in Washington who are experts in killing new companies. The (Federal Communications Commission) and others will have to stand firm.”

Plus, the bigger players that control the cable networks, for example, are bound to have an edge over the little guys who just make use of them. But for the moment, and happily for consumers, competition has sent prices tumbling as the various players try to carve out market share.

One sour note is that when your computer is down due to anything from a power outage to a virus, the VoIP phone service is automatically out of action until you’re back online.

LONG-DISTANCE BARGAIN

With either Vonage or AT&T’s CallVantage, users play a flat rate that allows them to call all over the United States and Canada without any additional charges. Nada. Vonage throws in Puerto Rico as well. International call rates don’t break the bank, either. Vonage charges 6 cents a minute to call Madrid, Mexico City or Santiago, 5 cents to Buenos Aires, 7 cents to Caracas; with a few places oddly higher like Quito (18 cents) and Nicaragua (20 cents). CallVantage rates are similar, sometimes a penny more per minute. But prices are changing all the time.

Katherine Bagin explains that CallVantage users get the same low international rates from any phone in the United States by calling in the pin number of their “calling card on the go” to the AT&T portal. Many who regularly call Latin America, Spain and elsewhere have discovered Web-based virtual calling cards like Nobelcom.com. You have to use a pin number, but the calls are less than 2 cents a minute. Buy 20 hours for $20 and the card seems to last forever.

Besides saving money, VoIP is amazingly versatile. CallVantage, for example, has a nifty call-forwarding feature called Locate Me: If you don’t pick up your CallVantage phone, the call rings various other numbers that that you previously listed on your own personalized CallVantage website.

You might also consider the CallVantage feature of listing several telephone numbers on a single line, each with its own voice mail; a call log; speed dialing, and other features.

WELL-CONNECTED

As we become a more mobile society, says Bagin, “Our society is blurring the lines between business and home life. We have learned to be very mobile with wireless phones, and VoIP is a perfect complement to wireless.”

Or as some families mutter, “Dad is always at the office even when we’re on vacation.”

The whole CallVantage system is portable. You can take its little black box, called the telephone adapter, wherever you’re going, plug it into any convenient computer and voilà! You have the same number and area code that you did back home.

According to one Radio Shack store manager, “People buy Vonage phone adapters and take them back to their home countries in the Caribbean, so they can have a U.S. phone number there” to keep in touch with friends and family without paying long-distance charges. MultiPhone and other calling-card companies fix you up with a U.S. phone number in, say, Caracas, so that it’s just a local call for someone down in Venezuela to get in touch with you up north. Vonage promises to introduce Wi-Fi handsets good at any hot spot for wireless calling over the Internet.

All this is only the tip of the iceberg in an amazingly creative, versatile industry that has left us all without an excuse in the world for not keeping in touch.

CONNECTING AN E-PHONE

A: Plug in cable modem, turn on and wait until all lights go steady

B: Plug in telephone adapter and wait 30 seconds

C: Turn on PC

H