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/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen Hayes - a husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out. Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ Cut-Rate Calling, by Way of the Net April 8, 2004 By DAVID POGUE EVERY time an important piece of our lives goes electronic, much is gained, but something is lost, too. Audiophiles say that compact discs don't sound as warm as vinyl records. Home theaters are neat, but don't offer the communal fun of a movie theater crowd. And no matter how efficient e-mail may be, it can't touch the joy of receiving a handwritten letter on fine stationery, thoughtfully composed and concluding with the words "check enclosed." So stand back. The latest life component to make a radical, Internet-driven shift is ordinary home telephone service. This development is annoyingly called voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP, which means "calls that use the Internet's wiring instead of the phone company's." When you sign up, you get a little box that goes between your existing telephone and your broadband modem (that is, your cable modem or D.S.L. box, a requirement for most of these services). At that point you can make unlimited local, regional and long-distance calls anywhere in the United States for a fixed fee of $20 to $40 a month (plus the cost of your broadband Internet service, of course). Overseas calls cost about 3 cents a minute. These figures aren't subject to inflation by a motley assortment of tacked-on fees, either; voice-over-Internet service is exempt from F.C.C. line charges, state 911 surcharges, number-portability service charges and so on. Now, nerds have been making PC-to-PC Internet calls for years, using their computers' microphone and speakers. But VoIP is different: you dial and talk using a conventional phone. The computer doesn't even have to be on. The gold rush began last year when a startup called Vonage offered a $35-a-month calling plan. Soon it was joined by a crowd of similarly little-known services with names like VoicePulse, Packet 8, Broadvox and VoiceGlo. Recently, though, some much bigger names began taking the technology seriously: AT&T arrived on the scene last week with an Internet-based service, CallVantage, and last fall Cablevision, the cable TV company, began offering its own phone service, Optimum Voice. (Technically, Optimum Voice isn't an Internet service; it connects to the regular phone network by cable TV wiring. A review is on Page 7.) Most of these services have a jaw-dropping list of features. They include call waiting; caller ID; caller ID blocking (your number is invisible to those you call); call forwarding (incoming calls are automatically routed to, say, your cellphone when you're not home); call return (dial *69 to call back the last person who called you); call transfer ("You'll have to ask my dad in Denver about that; here, I'll transfer you"); automatic busy-line redial; Do Not Disturb (all calls go directly to voice mail during specified hours); Find Me (incoming calls try various phone numbers until you answer); multiple ring (incoming calls make all your various phone numbers ring at once); three-way calling, and more. Now, $20 to $40 may not necessarily represent an earth-shattering discount from your existing phone bills. Verizon, for example, offers unlimited local and long-distance residential phone service - the usual way, over phone wires - with five calling features for $60 a month (not counting all those exciting taxes and fees). SBC, another Baby Bell, offers unlimited calling with 11 features for $55. Still, even $20 a month is a decent savings. Besides, Internet phone services often use the power of the Web to enhance those standard calling features. For example, you can listen to your voice mail by dialing *123 on your phone, by visiting a Web page or by sitting back and letting your new Internet phone company send you sound attachments by e-mail. VoIP fans love that; not only can they save important messages forever, but they can also retrieve their messages from anywhere in the world. At this point, some readers have no doubt skipped to the Sports section. For many people, a natural reaction is: "Why take something as simple and reliable as the telephone and muck it up with complexity?" That's a legitimate concern, and only the first sign that VoIP service isn't for everybody. Here's another: when you have VoIP phone service, your phone number no longer requires any relationship to your physical location. You can choose any area code offered by the VoIP company. It need not be the area code where you live - in fact, it probably won't be, because at this early stage, the VoIP companies don't have access to numbers in every locality. You may live in Denver, but choose a Dallas number. What's nice about this independence is that you can travel with your little VoIP box. You can plug a telephone into it anywhere you can find broadband Internet service. Your home phone number will make the phone ring whether you're in Roanoke, Raleigh or Russia. Some companies even offer a second phone number for the same line (Vonage, VoicePulse, and Broadvox charge $5, $5 and $0 a month, respectively). So if you live in New York (area code 212) but have relatives in Cleveland (216), you can opt for a 216 bonus number that makes you a local call for your relatives. The downside of all this, of course, is that you may wind up being a long-distance call for people in your hometown. Conversely, you have to dial 1 + area code for every call you make, even to the house next door. No question, in VoIP land, things can get very weird very fast. While you're contemplating the drawbacks of Internet calling, consider this: most VoIP adapters accommodate only one handset per line. Many Internet phone customers wind up buying cordless phone systems that permit several handsets to communicate with a single base station. (Some fans hire an electrician to install the adapter where the phone lines enter the house, so that it affects all phone jacks, but that's a complex and iffy approach.) Remember, too, that you're now completely off the phone company's grid, which has a number of ramifications. First, your number is unlisted whether you like it or not. Second, only a few companies let you dial 411 (Broadvox, VoicePulse and, for a fee, Vonage) and 911 (Broadvox, Vonage and AT&T). But in either case, if your power or Internet service ever goes out, you'll lose your phone service too. Most VoIP services can auto-route incoming calls to a different number when the system goes down, but most VOIPers keep a cellphone as a backup anyway. Or a basic phone-company line. That will come in handy if you have gadgets that require a traditional analog phone line, like a TiVo, a home alarm system or a fax machine. (Vonage offers a fax line for $10 a month; Broadvox and AT&T say they'll lick the fax-line problem later this year.) The sound quality of VoIP calls is amazing. Every call sounds like it's being made from downstairs. The problem is delay (or latency, as telecom wonks call it). On Vonage, Packet8 or Broadvox, the delay is so severe your conversation partners come across not only as rude, because they're constantly "interrupting" you, but also distracted, because their timing seems off when they are reacting to your dramatic revelations and jokes. The worst part, of course, is that you sound equally rude and distracted to them. Using your computer to surf the Web doesn't affect the call quality. But downloading a file can make you sound "staticky," "watery" or "jiggly" (to use my test callees' terms). Your equipment, time of day and Internet speed can affect the severity of these problems. But in my testing, only VoicePulse and AT&T escaped the voice-delay issue; only Vonage and AT&T seemed exempt from the jiggly water sound during downloads. All right, suppose you're still game. You have a cellphone or backup land line, you love features and you figure you can save hundreds of dollars a year. How do you choose an Internet phone company? If you care about having an area code that matches your current one, look for a company that offers numbers in that area. Packet8, Vonage and Broadvox offer phone numbers in 47, 39 and 32 states, respectively, although for only a few area codes in each state. At the opposite extreme is AT&T, which currently offers only area codes in New Jersey and Texas (although anyone can sign up, of course). But AT&T, like all of these companies, intends to expand rapidly in the coming year. For sheer economy, Packet8 is almost unbelievable. It offers fewer calling features than its rivals (no speed dial, auto-redial, or Find Me), and the voice-delay problem can be bad. But imagine having unlimited local, regional and long-distance calling for $20 a month. VoicePulse is another standout, thanks to its long list of security features. Telemarketer blocking rejects calls from automated dialing computers; international call blocking prevents guests or teenagers from racking up an overseas bill; and call filtering offers astonishing control over who (in your address book) can call you at what hours. The $25 monthly plan is an excellent value, although it requires a one-year commitment after the trial period. (All of the plans offer a money-back trial period.) But in terms of pure excellence, AT&T's CallVantage service takes the cake. At $40 a month, it's the most expensive service, but the call quality is close to perfect (no download distortion, almost no voice delay). You get a beautifully written manual, cheekily called "User's Guide for the Digital Communication Revolution." All of these services offer a real-time, Web-based call log (numbers only), but on AT&T's, you can click on a number to see the name of the caller, click on the voice-mail icon to hear the message that person left for you, click on the number to return the call, and so on. AT&T also offers what it's called a voice portal, a local number that you can dial to retrieve voice mail, change your settings (Do Not Disturb, for example) and even make calls. You can reach the portal from any phone - a pay phone, a cellphone or a friend's phone, for example - which means that you can get to your voice mail or make free calls even when you're out or when the power's out. Finally, AT&T's phone support center is always open. I know that because it took until 2 a.m. to get AT&T's adapter box working. (My home network includes an Ethernet router - an inexpensive box that distributes a broadband Internet signal to several computers. The adapters from most VoIP companies plug right into an empty jack on this router. But the AT&T, Vonage and Broadvox boxes must be installed before the router, between it and the broadband modem. That's a small point for most people, but a migraine nightmare for consumers whose cable modem isn't even on the same floor as the router. Ahem.) At this early moment in the birth of Internet phone companies, you can save all kinds of money by tolerating some quirks and peccadilloes. But as the VoIP companies expand their area-code offerings, work the kinks out of the voice transmissions and build up their network of intermediary 411 and 911 call centers, the benefits of Internet-based calling will entail fewer and fewer compromises. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/technology/circuits/08stat.html?ex=1082468120&ei=1&en=b58638ea92626cb5 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. 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