Expats
Now Can Call Home For Less
Long-Distance
Rates ~ by Dennis Grant
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many people living abroad, the cost of long-distance service means carefully
monitoring how often they call friends and family. An evolving technology
called Broadband Internet Telephony is changing all that. Calls carried
over the Internet, and not a traditional phone line, avoid many regulatory
fees, allowing heavily discounted prices. By reducing the cost of
international calls by up to 80 percent, the difference between local and
long- distance calling has almost evaporated.
Indeed, broadband
Internet telephony is disrupting the business models of major phone companies,
threatening to slash their profits. “Broadband Internet telephony
will permanently change the cost base of phone service in a radical way,”
says Mark Main, an analyst at Ovum, the largest European-based advisor
on telecoms, software and IT services. Advances in technology make
the quality of broadband Internet telephony calls virtually indistinguishable
from calls carried over traditional landlines. Not only that, broadband
Internet use has grown exponentially; 20 million Europeans currently subscribe
to broadband service, according to industry estimates. |
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An array of
companies offers a range of broadband Internet services. For instance,
Asylum Telecom (www.asylumtel.com),
headquartered in New York City, with R&D and operational support offices
in Budapest, Hungary, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, specializes in serving
the expatriate residential and small-business market in Europe. The
company’s co-founder, Paul Cheng, an expatriate for eight years, came up
with the idea while visiting his parents in his native U.S. “I looked
for a cheaper way of staying in touch with family and friends back home,
but I found a lot of problems with existing services,” Cheng says.
He managed to overcome those obstacles with the creation of Asylum 1.0,
launched earlier this year. An easy-to-install device connects a
customer’s existing telephone equipment to their broadband Internet connection.
This converts voice from an analog to a digital signal, which can be sent
over a broadband Internet connection, and connect with any phone number
in the world. The cost of the device for European customers — 77
EUR (plus shipping and VAT) — quickly pays for itself in phone bill savings.
The service
is designed to work in conjunction with existing telecom services.
“Home users can easily switch to their local telecom provider for local
calls, while using Asylum for international calls or to call other Asylum
users for free,” notes Rajiv Kapoor, Asylum’s co-founder and vice-president
of marketing.
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Asylum’s pilot
customers have saved between 60 and 90 percent off of their previous phone
bills. For instance, the rate from any country to the U.S., Germany, France
and the U.K. is 3 eurocents per minute, compared with a landline rate of
at least four times that. In addition, Asylum delivers features not
available with traditional phone services, such as unlimited free calls
to other Asylum subscribers and, for business clients, a free dedicated
telephone conference room for up to six people.
Other major
players in the industry include Skype Technologies SA (www.skype.com),
a Luxembourg-based enterprise launched last year. Skype’s Internet-connected
phone and instant messenger system, similar to ICQ, allow a network of
users to stay in touch with no cost or time limitations. Subscribers
may create “buddy lists” and search the Skype database for people to contact.
Vonage (www.vonage.com),
based in the U.S., is one of the pioneer broadband Internet providers.
Besides a regular phone number, subscribers can pick “virtual” numbers
with any area code, allowing a local call to a particular city called frequently.
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Broadband
Internet telephony is transforming telephone habits … and relationships.
Tamas Steinmetz, a software engineer in Budapest, finds that now he makes
more and longer international calls “without having to watch the clock.”
Tina Martinez, a New York firefighter, reestablished contact with her brother
who’d been living overseas for a decade. Instead of 13-20 USD per
call, all calls are free (both subscribe to Asylum 1.0). And she
likes the convenience of dialing fewer than half of the 17 digits required
of her previous phone service. Best of all, her children are getting to
know their uncle and cousins for the first time. Notes Martinez:
“I can put my three- and seven-year-olds on the line, walk out of the room,
and let them talk to their hearts’ content.”
To contact
Dennis Click Here
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