When it comes to today’s digitally-connected world, professional content creators often call upon many forms of communication. While most content creators rely on e-mail messages to share images with clients and relay day-to-day changes in a job or workflow, almost all of us use our ordinary telephones for important communication.
However, some recent changes in phone legislation and the expansion of new digital telephony services could cause that situation to change. These changes cover both wireless phones and so-called Web phones, which leverage broadband access in your office for voice telephone.
Although some of these new phone services may be attractive to content professionals for both convenience and cost savings, it’s an open question if they can really fill the bill for your needs.
Moving Towards A Wireless World
Traditional wired telephones are a staple of all business offices and homes. At the same time, most professional content creators now carry a wireless phone. But that means having two phone numbers and communicating those numbers to your clients, chums and family. That chore may someday become a thing of the past.
In late November, the Federal Communications Commission changed the rules covering “local number portability,” a k a LNP. The rules deal with numbers for wireless phones as well as wired phones, which in the trade call “wirelines.”
The new rules cover a lot of ground: they let you retain your local wired number to another local phone when you move; and keep your wireless number if you change carriers.
This is an obvious benefit to everyone, consumers and business alike. It will also let us keep costs down on business cards: we can just put in our e-mail address and phone number on the card and hope that both of those will stay put. Of course, this transfer only works within a metropolitan area (currently about 100 cities), it doesn’t apply to long moves (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: As you can see in this map, many large metropolitan areas support the new phone portability. And yet there are entire states without any coverage or hunks of states where the new rules don’t apply.
One intriguing possibility that’s now grabbing the attention of content creators is to merge phone numbers between wired and wireless phones. In addition to switching from one wireless carrier to another, or one wired phone to another, now you can move your wired phone number to a wireless phone. Or back again, from wireless to a new wired phone (although nobody is talking about this one much).
As the cost of wireless services keeps falling, the cost of some features of wired services has been climbing. Some wireless plans come with big buckets of minutes with no long-distance or roaming charges. So a good number of content creators are looking at going solo with wireless.
Wires Can Sometimes Be a Good Thing!
While content creators may eye the convenience of a single, mobile phone number, and even the cost savings, I suggest that you be conservative when it comes to removing your wired phone.
Here are a few considerations to keep in mind:
- While we all love the convenience and mobility, cell phones have serious problems with reliability and quality. Wired telephone service is very robust, providing its own power and lines as well as supporting a wide selection of mostly inexpensive phone equipment.The other day, I spoke with a creator who said there were only two places in her office where her cell phone worked. Like a smoker in a smoke-free workplace, she heads outdoors to talk on the wireless phone. This is an impossible situation, especially in the winter.
We’ve all had times on cell phones experiencing terrible sound reception or places where the signal drops off. We tend to excuse this quality issue because of the increased mobility and convenience the phones provide.
However, that mobility is for our convenience! What about our clients, who may be on wired phones and frustrated with this negative communication experience?
In addition, most consider quality in terms of the signal that’s received instead of what is sent. Content creators doing business over a cell phone should keep in mind that the poor quality of reception and signal with mobile phones is also degrading the quality of communication between you and your client.
To my ears, the sound produced by cell phones is awful even with a solid connection. The audio that’s sent out is often clipped and compressed, and the received sound is never as good as can be found with even the most inexpensive wired phone.
- A single phone number is also a single point of failure, something that we try to avoid with digital workflows. This fact became very clear to me last week when my wired phone and DSL connection suddenly stopped working.At that moment, I was very thankful for my redundant wireless phone as I worked my way through my wired service’s technical support phone tree to report and troubleshoot the problem. And I was able to join in on several phone meetings, even though my cell phone doesn’t have a mute feature like my wired headset phone (I admit that the cell phone may have that capability but I’ve never figured it out).
Without the second phone service, I would have been out of luck.
- Wireless phones are much more prone to human interface problems than wired phones. I often mute my phone when going into a movie or other public venue and then forget to turn it back on. And I forget to plug it into the charger every now and then. This is both annoying (because I’ve missed calls) and frustrating (because I notice that the battery is dead exactly when I need to make a call).For this problem, I recently came across an emergency power charger from Compact Power Systems Inc. called Cellboost, which is offered in different flavors for most phones. The Cellboost device is essentially a disposable battery with a small piece of logic that can quickly recharge your phone. In about two minutes, you can be talking while the device keeps charging your battery. Each one costs from $5 to $10.
So, try not to be swayed by convenience and moderate cost savings and go exclusively with 24/7 wireless telephony. For reasons of quality, reliability and disaster recovery, now may not be the time for content professionals to abandon their wired phone service.
Internet Phone Pioneers
Beyond moving towards a totally wireless lifestyle, some content creators are now looking at Internet phone services. Instead of using the established phone networks for calls, the Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) technology digitizes your voice and sends it across the Internet, much like any other streaming media.
The system is very simple: you sign up for services with a provider just as you would for a wired or wireless phone. The service sends you a new phone number, a telephone adapter box that connects your broadband cable or DSL modem on one side and your existing telephone equipment to the other, including phones and fax machines (see Figure 2). After the set up process, you pick up your phone and there’s a dial tone just like any other phone.
Figure 2: Several different Internet phone adapters are on the market, such as Motorola’s SURFboard VT1000 Voice Terminal pictured here. It looks a lot like a router or switch, because that’s really what it is. This model offers two phone jacks and two Ethernet ports.
The question you might ask is “why?” With regular phones already installed, what’s the advantage of sending voice traffic over Internet lines instead of the current phone network?
Of course, there’s no single answer, however, the VOIP services offer lower-cost long-distance calling; the opportunity to create a phone “presence” in a remote city; and easy configuration for features such as call forwarding and billing.
The largest service provider of VOIP technology is Vonage Holdings Corp., which calls itself the “Broadband Phone Company.” It has about 80,000 customers, according to analysts.
The cost savings from these services can be very attractive, especially for small businesses like many content-creation shops. Since the Internet phone service is outside the current phone system, it lets customers avoid the long list of taxes imposed on current wired phone accounts. (I question if this is the best social policy. This was also discussed in hearings held last week by the Federal Communications Commission.)
Vonage’s small business plan offers unlimited calling within the U.S. and Canada for a flat rate of $49.99 a month as well as a wide range of standard (free) features, such as a fax number, voice mail, caller-ID and call-transfer. A full feature list is available here.
Another interesting feature with Internet phone services is the separation of the area code of a phone number with the physical location of the phone. After all, the Internet doesn’t care where you plug in the phone, unlike the wired phone exchanges. Many customers use the VOIP services as a way to create a local branding or a business presence in a different physical place.
For example, suppose you had many clients in a another part of the country, Atlanta, and wanted to give your clients a local phone number to call. The problem is that you live in New York City. While you could purchase a toll-free number, this is very expensive, and comes with many limitations.
With the Internet phone service, you can simply request an Atlanta number from the carrier and that will be your number. There’s no extra trouble — this is a standard feature of these services. If you move to California, you will still have that Atlanta connection.
Finally, the digital nature of the system provides a much richer environment to manage all its many features. Instead of using a push-button interface on the phone, users can access settings on Web pages, and from anywhere. The system also provides billing and other information.
Of course, all the data is digital, which offers some interesting capabilities for those folks on the road. For example, Internet phone users can redirect voice mail messages to another place as sound-file attachments on e-mails.
With all these capabilities and cost savings, what’s the downside?
First, performance and quality can vary on bandwidth. If something bothers the flow of data on the Internet, you could experience a problem with service.
A more likely problem would be some slowdown on the local network, such as transfers of large files, something else that’s common with content shops.
I understand that Vonage now lets users give priority to voice traffic, while slowing down other broadband access.
And then we must return to the arguments of redundancy, or its lack. With an Internet phone, you are totally dependent on your broadband connection and its reliability. For some, that may be solid-enough. Others may want to let the technology and services settle for a while before adoption.
As the Talmud says: “Three things are good in little measure and bad in large: yeast, salt and hesitation.” From my experience last week, with two outages of both wired phone and broadband, I have serious reservations about taking the leap to Internet telephony.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on March 4, 2004
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I agree with David that you shouldn’t give up your land line. Redundancy is good.
I only give out my wireless number to my clients, friends, etc. But, they can can always get a hold of me. How?
Well, I have my wireless phone set up to forward to my home phone when there is no answer on the wireless. I keep my wireless turned off when I’m at home. When someone calls it automatically comes to my home phone. If I’m out and about I have my wireless turned on and I’m available to take the call.
I also do not have voicemail on my wireless. All voicemail goes to my home phone voicemail.
It is a great way to always be available and still only have one number to give out.