VOIP - A Telecom Revolution

If you have local phone service for your home or business, chances are you are going through an RBOC (or Regional Bell Operating Carrier) like SBC or Sprint, or you go through a reseller (CLEC, Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) like Talk America or the 1000 others that have came into the reseller business.

You pay your flat monthly fees, plus what they call "applicable taxes and surcharges". But how much are you really paying? Let's break it down. Suppose your monthly service plan is $19.99. On top of that you are billed the following:

Sales Tax (State) $0.75 or more
Federal Excise Tax (Fed) $0.68 or more
Interstate Network Charge (Fed) $0.03 or more
Common Line Charge $5.35 or more
State Access Charge $3.28 or more
Fed USF Combined High Cost and School (Fed) $0.57 or more
Local Number Portability Surcharge $0.28 or more
E911 Operational Surcharge County Commission (County) $0.80 or more
E911 Operational Surcharge Voter Approved (County) $3.20 or more
Telecommunications Relay Service Surcharge (State) $0.17 or more

So is it really $19.99? Actually it's not anywhere close to that rate.
The ADDITIONAL fees and charges can total from $12 to $20 a month on top of your service plan. Expect to pay about $35-$50 a month for local phone service WITHOUT any features.

And if you do want some line features or an unpublished number you can expect to dish out even more.

But what happened to those laws that were supposed to lower phone service costs and invite competition? Yeah right! There has never really been a true competitor to the ancient land line service (copper wire) technology. You could only chose what phone company to go with, but the rates were still pretty much in the same ballpark, and it was still the same outdated technology.

Even worse, just recently AT&T merged with SBC forming what is now one of the largest phone companies on the planet. It looks like we have come full circle to the monopoly of the not to distant past.

Fortunately, we have seen development of new and emerging technologies that can give the local phone companies some apparent competition. One being the Internet, using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) technology. And of course the other more obvious competitor, the cell phone, which many wireless providers have included long distance in their plans to make it more attractive than landline.

But though cellular has been around for about 10 years, it is still wireless and dependent on "in-air" transmission. It's proven that this technology has its limitations and does not have the same degree of quality compared to wired landline service. There is the tendency to have more dropped calls and breakups depending on how good your signal strength is.

But thankfully over the last few years ther have been huge advances in VOIP, allowing people to effectively use the Internet in place of their traditional voice traffic carrier. Many predict the next wave of the future will truly be Voice Over IP. As broadband phone service become more readily available in new areas it has brought an unprecedented opportunity to capitalize on this technology by using it for something other than sending and receiving data.

However, it will only be a matter of time before the FCC comes in and starts to put their own little regulatory fees in place for these services as well. Technically, the services are not telecommunications providers since the voice traffic is sent via data transmission. We will have to wait and see how that all pans out.

If you have never tried a VOIP service before it may just be the time to check it out. Many of the providers like Vonage will offer trial periods where you can demo the service and then cancel without any risks or contracts. And expect the competitors in the VOIP business to only grow more and more as eventually there is the possibility the baby bells themselves will run all of their traffic over VOIP.

Granted, there is a lot of user's bashing voice providers due to their own bad experiences. But bear in mind, those comments may be outdated, and people are more likely to complain then they are to provide praise.

Check it out for yourself, and see if just possibly you too can join this revolution and ditch your local phone provider once and for all, and not to mention save a few bucks in the process.

Some of the latest VOIP providers include:
Vonage, AT&T CallVantage, Packet8, BroadVoice, Lingo, and SunRocket Internet Phone Service.

For more information try these links:

IP Phone Ratings.com

Whichvoip.com

VOIP Provider Reviews.com

Phonedog.com Phone Company reviews

Vonage Broadband Phone Service

What is Microsoft Hiding?

Computer privacy has long been an ongoing and controversial issue. And with the latest Google saga here comes yet another "gut renching" discovery.

What if you learned that Microsoft logged all of your data and actions on your computer and stored it in hidden files that can not be accessed?

Here is what this one web site says:

"There are folders on your computer that Microsoft has tried hard to keep secret. Within these folders you will find two (major) things: Microsoft Internet Explorer has been logging all of the sites you have ever visited -- even after you've cleared your cache, and Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express has been logging ALL of your e-mail correspondence -- even after you've erased them from your trashbin. (This also includes all incoming and outgoing e-mail attachments.) And believe me, that's not even the half of it. "

Is it really true? Does Microsoft take all of our information and store it in a big data vault somewhere? While there are obvious legalities in this, it still has yet to be fully uncovered, or proven.

But if so, why hasn't anyone done anything about it? Could it be that Microsoft executives may have found ways to secretly provide huge payoffs to lawmakers to stop any detailed investigations? Nobody really knows. And proving that would be a whole different story. Perhaps it should at least be acknowledged that it is indeed possible.

I can only recommend that you take a look at the article "Microsoft's really hidden files" and just judge for yourself.

Here's the link:
http://www.microsuck.com/content/ms-hidden-files.shtml

Be forewarned - Any actions taken to modify your PC can be risky.