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A little after 8 am
last Thursday, Tom Fitzgerald stood in the rain at
Northeast 22nd Avenue and Oregon Street. I stood inside
Urban Grind, the spacious cafe at this sleepy corner
just off Sandy Boulevard. He could see me. I could see
him. We were talking to each other on the phone.
The only
thing that made this behavior anything other than stupid
was how we were talking. The call was made without owing
a cent to a local phone service. Using technology many
of Portland's hyper-committed geek activists believe is
the Next Big Thing, Fitzgerald and I bid sayonara to
Qwest's standard phone system and spoke through
cyberspace. Over the Internet, he came in loud and
clear.
Fitzgerald and Aaron Johnson--volunteers for Portland's
nonprofit Personal Telco Project--drilled me in the
basics of Session Initiation Protocol. Tech-speak aside,
SIP converts human voices into digital signals that move
over the 'Net. Users can call anywhere without using
standard phone lines--or paying a dime for long
distance.
"It's a
complete flip," Johnson says. "People used to use their
phones to get their computers to the Internet. Now you
can use the Internet as a phone line."
The
phone at Urban Grind, which Johnson hooked up last week,
is the only free public Internet phone anywhere, as far
as PTP knows. Anyone can walk into the cafe and give the
phone a whirl for the price of a latte, opening a new
front in Personal Telco's campaign to install free
wireless Internet across Portland.
Which is
not to say you'll be able to call Grandma in Sheboygan
just yet. Right now, it's only practical for
Internet-phone users to call other Internet-phone users.
In part, that's because SIP phone numbers work on a
six-digit system, not a 10-digit system. (It is possible
to have your SIP number translated into a 10-digit
number, which is how Fitzgerald was able to get my call
on his cell phone.)
This
lack of integration with mainstream phones makes
Internet phones something of a private club. Even for
the SIP-savvy, calls don't always go through. The
complex weave of noise created by two human chatterboxes
is harder to transmit than emails, images or sound
files, which are stored whole and forwarded across the
Net with no real-time requirement.
"Sound
is real-time, or it's annoying," Johnson notes.
Urban
Grind, as any of its thick crowd of morning laptop
jockeys could tell you, offers free wireless Internet
access. But SIP phones can work on hardwired broadband
connections, too, and an Internet phone number follows
its master anywhere. You can use something that looks
like a regular phone but has an Ethernet jack in the
back, or a "softphone," an application that mimics a
phone on your computer screen.
The
infrastructure to guarantee quality connections for
every call isn't there yet. But for people and
organizations that can save by declaring independence
from the global phone grid, the technology is already
paying off.
"Let's
say Aaron and I work for the same company, but Aaron's
in Tokyo for a conference," Fitzgerald says. "I can dial
through the Internet no matter where he is, and we don't
pay long distance. I'm going to set up my sister in
Arizona and my sister in New Hampshire, and then they
can talk their heads off for hours, for free."
This
prospect does not please Qwest, nor any other commercial
phone company. The battles over Internet phone
regulation remain to be fought. But PTP activists see a
near future when Internet phones are as ubiquitous as
cell phones have become.
"My son
in the U.K. has broadband, and I'm going to send him an
SIP phone," says Nigel Ballard, a transplanted Brit who
serves on Personal Telco's board. "My SIP phone rings
here in Portland, and we can chat for as long as we want
without incurring any costs. Now how can that not be the
next big thing?"
Originally published on WEDNESDAY,
3/31/2004 |
