VOIP - what is the final frontier

VTalkVoip is a collaboration between Mobif Bhd and VCN which provides a device(SIP adapter) that allow one to connect normal analog phone to a broadband network. it is being sold for RM449 and its marketing strategy is "call anywhere in the world free !!!" For those people who don't know about VOIP, they thought is a magic bullet... actually, it is just a gimmick in a sense that the whole sentence should be extended to "call anywhere in the world where there is good Internet connection and make sure that both side are having the same adapter." There is no point doing VOIP with 56k dialup, it wont really work. In other words, if you have a girlfriend staying in U.K, you wanted to enjoy free call, it is possible if you invest in two units of such device. But the problem is that many countries, especially non developed countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Middle East countries, Afrika... have very bad Internet infrastructure.. Forget about USA, U.K, Singapore and Europe..IDD rates to these places are basically free in a sense that you can get even less that 10 cents per minute..

So VOIP is really going where ?? To make the telephony free to the whole world ?? VTalkVoip is not the first of its kind, no doubt they claimed to have Global Numbers where you are given a global number which is unique globally and these number is registered to your SIP adapter (changeable) and people can call you just anywhere as long as you are connected to the Internet. It is just like the ICQ number or the username for your SkyPE,MSN,Yahoo and etc.

So if GPRS/EDGE/3G is really cheap ... Right now in Malaysia is :
1. Digi - offerring RM99 monthly
2. Maxis - offerring RM120 montly.
3. Celcom - Charged per download.

They say the 4G is coming - Wimax.. but you would need to use some kind of additional device to get your handphone connected. Only those PDA, laptop can work with Wimax

coming back to the question, if connecting to the Internet is really cheap from your handphone around the world... then if SkyPE, ICQ,MSN,Yahoo are ready with a mobile phone version for their softwares.. then telephony would eventually be free.

So, everybody is waiting for that moment, if Maxis or Digi or Celcom offered 1M Internet connection to user at RM50, wow!!! something different would happen, nobody would be using house phone. You would be calling your mother with handphone anyway, coz it is going to be free.