VOIP... voice over IP the future of the telephone. Anyone that makes long distance phone calls in the USA is an idiot if they don't take advantage of this technology. Even the phone companies are realizing that the future is in VOIP.VOIP is simply using the internet to carry your conversation... without a computer. Plug your VOIP adapter into your router and a regular telephone into it and your phone works anywhere you have internet. The phone number follows you.
Normally you don't pay any per minute fee to call anywhere in the USA regardless of where your telephone actually is. Some services offer the calls for a penny or two a minute without a monthly service charge.
If you are living in Costa Rica a VOIP phone is a great way to keep in touch back home (and those back home can also call you without incurring international calling rates).
Now one of those negatives you might encounter living in Costa Rica is that the phone company is a government owned and operated monopoloy and from that prespective VOIP is a very bad idea. It goes against the power and money of regular phone service.
Rather than getting on board and encouraging the development of VOIP (a boon for high tech companies wanting to locate in Costa Rica) I found that my service was blocked. The VOIP service simply wouldn't give me a dial tone and tech support for the VOIP company said the packets were arriving altered.
One of the routers in Costa Rica was changing the VOIP packets so they wouldn't synchronize with the service effectively stopping the service from working. I was able to use a VPN to encrpt the packets and place my calls though with a lower quality.
Whether this is an ongoing project blocking VOIP calls or just some experimintation I have no idea. One of the disadavantages of VOIP is most services use a standard protocol that can be easily messed with or intercepted. Both the audio and especially the dialing information can be recorded.
