World Telecommunication Day 1999 |
Phoning home is no longer an expensive, tiresome business with the choice of using a public phone or paying extortionate hotel rates. Now, there myriad ways of staying in touch, and they are getting cheaper all the time.
All over the world, the liberalization of telecommunications services has opened markets up to competition, which means falling phone charges and a greater choice of services from a host of service providers. Simon Forge, principal consultant with OSI, based in London, says, ''In the 1920s, the cost of a three-minute trans-Atlantic call was the equivalent of $1,500. The same call now costs a few cents. Even so, prices will fall by a far greater order of magnitude in the next decade.''
Phone cards signaled the beginning of better things for those on the hoof. There are two basic variations: The first is buying a prepaid card from a service provider that guarantees to undercut the incumbents and dial into their service; identification is provided by a PIN. The second is to have a calling card account with the usual supplier so that wherever the caller is in the world, he or she can get in touch with that operator, making calling as easy as it is at home. There are two snags, however. Hotels got wise to being bypassed and blocked access to cut-price service numbers, and, although using a home operator's calling card is cheaper than hotel rates, it is still expensive.
Another option, which is becoming increasingly commonplace, is using mobile communications. Although roaming between countries is still relatively expensive, prices are starting to fall sharply. In the meantime, paging has emerged as a cheap alternative to using mobiles for Internet-related services, including e-mail. According to the Dutch paging operator CallMax, such applications already account for a third of its traffic. Its subscribers include consultants KPMG and Ernst & Young, who report that they have halved their mobile phone bills.
Two-way paging is being introduced around the world. In conjunction with Internet-related services, it is likely to prove popular in the two biggest paging markets, the United States and Asia. Meanwhile, the GSM Association, which represents network operators offering Global System for Mobile (GSM) services, reported that in April this year more than a billion text messages were sent; in Germany, some operators are already clocking 100,000 messages an hour, according to Michael Stocks, chairman of the association.
While mobile phones are becoming more like computers, with larger screens and more extensive keypads to accommodate text and data messages, laptop computers are increasingly being used for phone calls as well as to process and transmit data. Even better, they allow the traveler to make calls via the Internet, reducing the cost to a fraction of what it would be to make a standard international phone call. Industry estimates suggest that the Internet telephony business, now worth less than $1 billion a year, will reach $24 billion a year in the next five years.
Eli Wurterman is chief executive officer and founder of deltathree.com, now part of RSL Communications, which pioneered telephony over the Internet. It now offers its customers phone-to-phone calls across the Internet as well as PC to phone and vice versa, and calls conveyed between PCs. The service was launched in May 1996, says Mr. Wurterman, as ''one big experiment that has now become mainstream.'' He adds: ''Over the next five years, perhaps 25 percent to 30 percent of all phone traffic will be carried by IP [Internet Protocol].''
There is a new generation of so-called unified messaging services, whereby messages can be translated from their original format to one that is convenient for the recipients to access wherever they happen to be. A good example of such a service is Jfax, which is provided by Esat.net, part of Ireland's Esat Telecommunications Group. It routes faxes and voice mail to an Internet e-mail account for audio playback or visual display on a laptop computer to and from just about anywhere in the world.
Unified messaging has a big role to play, according to the London-based consultancy Ovum, which predicts: ''The introduction of unified messaging services will be as significant to the development of telecoms as the introduction of direct dialing.''
Annie Turner