By Christopher Stern, The Washington Post
"Shush, it's long-distance!"
For decades, a long-distance call was something special -- and
expensive. It could instantly quiet a dinner-table conversation and
infuse a household with an aura of anxiety or romance.
Over time, long-distance became cheaper and more routine. And now it
appears close to disappearing entirely as its own category, thanks to
the popularity of unlimited telephone packages. For millions of
people, it no longer makes a difference if they call across the
country or across the street.
What began as a slow change has been accelerating in the past year or
so, upending an industry long viewed as a steady utility. A
combination of deregulation and new technologies has spawned a
sometimes bewildering choice of pricing plans for consumers from
different players -- traditional phone giants, wireless firms, cable
systems and Internet companies. Most of them offer connections for
much less than what separate local and long-distance used to cost.
Further roiling the industry, consumers have begun to embrace
a technology that allows them to make calls over their high-speed
Internet connections instead of phone lines. Such services are driving
prices down further.
The technology has been waiting in the wings for several years but has
begun to take off now that 25 percent of the nation's homes have
subscribed to a high-speed Internet service. In the past few months,
Verizon, AT&T and other large telephone companies have introduced
Internet-based offerings.
The technology is already popular with businesses that have been able
to cut their long-distance bills by as much as 50 percent. American
West Transportation, a furniture shipping company in California, used
to pay $30,000 or more as it kept in touch with customers and
employees nationwide.
But in December, American West signed a contract with Covad
Communications Group Inc. to move all of its telephone traffic onto
the Internet. Now American West's monthly long-distance bill is around
$20,000, and when the transition is complete -- sometime next month --
costs should drop to about $15,000, said Curt Scott, who is in charge
of American West Transportation's phone system.
Full story at:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04222/358706.stm
How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home:
http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html
If you live in Michigan, subscribe to the MI-Telecom group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MI-Telecom/