Are you looking for your true calling? Start with broadband
KEEPING in touch while away from home can be expensive, especially if you or a loved one is traveling abroad. Hotels often add huge surcharges for calls made from the room, cellphone international roaming charges can be outrageous, and friends or family who need to call while you are in a foreign country can be charged ridiculous amounts by their phone company.
For example, international roaming charges for cellphones may increase the cost of a call by 20 times the normal rate. I just added $56 to my cellphone bill for only 41 minutes of calls that I made and received on a September trip to London, which worked out to $1.37 a minute, including taxes.
A five-minute local phone call from the Park Lane Hotel in London in November 2004 cost $11. Without an international calling plan, you are at the mercy of the phone company when you're calling abroad. Without such a plan, you can pay $2 or more per minute.
Some travelers use prepaid calling cards, which can cut the cost of calling while abroad. And now, thanks to the wide availability of broadband Internet service, travelers have more options for keeping in touch at a fraction of the traditional cost.
Computer telephony, or VoIP (which, translated from geek speak, means "voice over Internet protocol"), allows you to make and receive calls between computers for free.
All VoIP requires is a microphone to talk into and speakers or a headset to listen.
Phone, cable and various Internet companies have jumped on the VoIP bandwagon. Some, such as Vonage and Verizon VoiceWing, charge set-up and monthly service fees. Others, such as Skype, Yahoo, MSN and Google, allow free voice calls between computers.
Some VoIP services, such as Skype, also have options that allow you to call a land-line number for a fraction of what you may have been paying for a long distance call.
In some cases, these services let you set up a local telephone number almost anywhere in the world or forward local calls to a foreign number for pennies per minute.
I decided to try 3-year-old Skype, which has 75 million registered users worldwide. Signing up is free and involves downloading a small software program. There are no adware or spyware programs attached to it, Skype says.
Using the $10 Skype starter kit, which includes a microphone and earplug that I hooked into the back of my computer (the plugs are color-coded so even the ungeek among us can pretty easily figure it out), I experimented by calling Michele Yamada, another Skyper.
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