NATIONAL7Spotlight Weekly)]

Net Gain

Bringing the world closer through free long distance calls

By AKSHAY SHARMA AND BINAY SHRESTHA

If you have a multimedia PC with a modem right beside your desk, then you might be familiar with Internet calls. If you donít, you may be missing something. You may be busy using multimedia resources in some hi-end play-stations or listening to music with surround-sound through media-player.

Still there is lot more you can fetch and enjoy out of those built-in audio/visual assets. But you need an Internet connection and a headset to grasp the benefits of Internet calls.

"Go and subscribe it today from the Internet Service Provider [ISP] nearby. It wonít take long to get it done,î says Gopal Simkhada, managing director of Worldwide Telecom Centre.

When you place an Internet call from your PC, your call is then transmitted over the Internet into local telephone networks and, finally, passed on to the regular telephone you are calling. The result is real time, uninterrupted, full duplex voice communication, generally as good as traditional phone calls, and in some cases, even better.

Internet Telephony System is a new technology, which makes it possible to place domestic and international calls from a PC to any telephone in the world. You can get it all free of cost. So it has adversely affected the whole telecommunication sector as well. The price index for the international calls has dramatically changed all of a sudden. And it has knocked down to local rates.

However, there are some exceptions too. You have to pay a little to open the gateways of some countries to place calls as per their schemes. Under the provision of benefits, we can make savings up to 95 percent off the cost of traditional long distance calls. Nevertheless, surfing and calling at the same time is an extra advantage for the users.

We can place a call through one of the growing number of call providers, commonly referred to as Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP). The facilities vary upon the various ITSP. Call providers like Dialpad and Media Ring has played a significant role to initiate and promote Internet Telephony System in Nepal. Now, we have hand full of choices for ITSP, services and schemes.

Go2Call launched its initial web site last January. Yet it has achieved a major success as one of the global leaders in Internet calling by delivering the easiest, most convenient destination for Internet-based communications information, resources and calling. It has expanded its service giving free telephone access to eight different countries including USA, UK, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands and Sweden and serves worldwide on a pay-service scheme. Partnership with the renowned companies like visitalk.com for PC-to-PC communication, britannia.com, Zdnet.com etc. has definitely strengthened to uplift the Internet Calling trade.

"I have been using "Go-2-Call" for a while now. The competition between cyber cafČs in Kathmandu is certainly saving me a lot of money," says Nora Sanchez, a tourist from Mexico.

Analysts expect Internet telephony to explode in the year 2000 and beyond. Probe Research analyst Hilary Mine predicts Internet calls will reach 4 billion minutes in 2000.