People say that Hungarian is the language of the future, and it always will be. Similarly, you get the feeling that speech recognition is the technology of the future and always will be. Until recently the same was true of Internet telephony.
There are many technologies that fail because they don’t pass the ‘good enough’ test.
Having noticed that more and more friends are using Skype these days, it seems that VOIP passes the good enough test, for once the marketing blurb is right – it just works.
In fact, beyond that, two recent examples illustrate that it is now better than other means of telephony.
Example one: a friend’s cellphone ran out of juice, he resorted to war driving to find an open wifi network to contact me, his web based email didn’t work, couldn’t get a good enough connection to Instant Message me, but VOIP worked just fine.
Example two: a friend called via VOIP from India yesterday. The VOIP worked just fine, better than an Indian landline at $3 a minute, and when calling a US cellphone, it was the cell carrier that dropped the call.
VOIP is not only much much cheaper, but it is better.