The All-In-One Machine

    Having to read about VoIP brought my down memory lane, when the Internet first came about. I remember that for a brief time, when the Internet was starting to really come around, there were a bunch of companies that started providing free dial-up service. But sooner or later they found out that you need to make profit somehow if you want to stay afloat, so they either switched over or fell apart. I feel like this is going to happen with VoIP. Right now you have a bunch of free software that allows you do make these calls over your computer, but I think that sooner or later all the big phone companies are going to but in and start forcing everyone to pay for VoIP capabilities.

One thing that I’m a little concerned with is that by moving phone calls over to the Internet and computers, it seems as though we’re starting to put too much on one machine. It’s almost as if it’s going to get to the point that computers will do everything for us (and it’s getting kind of close to that), and so if there were ever some huge power outage or major technical meltdown, we would be sent back to the stone age because everything was dependent on one or two technologies. Kind of like Terminator 3 or those other movies where some machine learns to think on its own and completely screws the rest of the world over, except not so far-fetched. I didn’t  think about the fact that when the power goes off, most phones still work, and sometimes that can be a life-saver. If we start trusting our telephones to not only our computers, but to wireless internet services (which I think is where our country is headed towards), we might run into a lot of dropped calls and bad coverage, which means AT&T will have to keep raising the bar.

It’s kind of similar to how cell phones are becoming this “all-in-one” portable device. I mean, I completely understand the reasoning behind combining a Mp3 player with a cell phone that has internet access, because it allows someone to carry just 1 thing rather than 2 or 3, but at the same time, if you lose that one object, you just a) lost yourself a lot of money and b) lost yourself a lot of personal information/stuff. Combine that with the fact that most cell phones/mp3 players are becoming ridiculously small, and you got yourself a lot of frustrated people.

I like that as of now VoIP is giving people the ability to conduct free long-distance calls. My mom is from France and therefore makes a lot of long-distance calls there to speak with family, so I’d imagine that after awhile the bill starts to get pretty hefty. VoIP will allow her to skip all the expenses while providing her the opportunity to call my grandparents as much as she wants. Now if only she could learn how to use a computer…

Discussion Questions:

1)  Do you think people are more drawn to the reliability of a product or it’s cost?

2) Why does the FCC care about VoIP?