Are you looking for your true calling? Start with broadband

KEEPING in touch while away from home can be expensive, especially if you or a loved one is traveling abroad. Hotels often add huge surcharges for calls made from the room, cellphone international roaming charges can be outrageous, and friends or family who need to call while you are in a foreign country can be charged ridiculous amounts by their phone company.

For example, international roaming charges for cellphones may increase the cost of a call by 20 times the normal rate. I just added $56 to my cellphone bill for only 41 minutes of calls that I made and received on a September trip to London, which worked out to $1.37 a minute, including taxes.

A five-minute local phone call from the Park Lane Hotel in London in November 2004 cost $11. Without an international calling plan, you are at the mercy of the phone company when you’re calling abroad. Without such a plan, you can pay $2 or more per minute.

Some travelers use prepaid calling cards, which can cut the cost of calling while abroad. And now, thanks to the wide availability of broadband Internet service, travelers have more options for keeping in touch at a fraction of the traditional cost.

Computer telephony, or VoIP (which, translated from geek speak, means “voice over Internet protocol”), allows you to make and receive calls between computers for free.

All VoIP requires is a microphone to talk into and speakers or a headset to listen.

Phone, cable and various Internet companies have jumped on the VoIP bandwagon. Some, such as Vonage and Verizon VoiceWing, charge set-up and monthly service fees. Others, such as Skype, Yahoo, MSN and Google, allow free voice calls between computers.

Some VoIP services, such as Skype, also have options that allow you to call a land-line number for a fraction of what you may have been paying for a long distance call.

In some cases, these services let you set up a local telephone number almost anywhere in the world or forward local calls to a foreign number for pennies per minute.

I decided to try 3-year-old Skype, which has 75 million registered users worldwide. Signing up is free and involves downloading a small software program. There are no adware or spyware programs attached to it, Skype says.

Using the $10 Skype starter kit, which includes a microphone and earplug that I hooked into the back of my computer (the plugs are color-coded so even the ungeek among us can pretty easily figure it out), I experimented by calling Michele Yamada, another Skyper.

Yamada, a graduate student from Brisbane, Australia, has been using Skype for about 18 months to keep in touch with family and friends around the world.

She also uses the free service to keep in touch with her husband, Tony, who recently moved to New Zealand for a new job, as well as friends who are fellow Skypers. Recently in California for a program at USC, she allowed me to interview her using Skype.

The quality of sound was surprisingly good. I could hear her perfectly and vice versa.

In selecting Skype over some of the other services offered by MSN, Yahoo and Google, Yamada, a self-described early adopter of technology, said she was swayed by Skype’s interface and its sound quality.

Besides the free computer-to-computer service, Yamada uses the SkypeOut option to dial up her parents in Japan and her husband’s 92-year-old grandfather on their land lines.

Skype charges as little as 2 cents a minute to call a land line, although rates vary by country, and calls to cellphones can be much more. (See www.skype.com/products/skypeout/rates.)

Minutes can be bought, using a credit card or PayPal, in increments of $10 and $20.

To test the quality of SkypeOut, I called my parents’ land line to speak with my father. He sometimes has difficulty understanding me when I call from one of my regular phones. The quality of the Skype call was excellent, and he reported no difficulty hearing.

There are several ways Skype can cut phone costs for travelers. If you carry a laptop, any place that has a Wi-Fi connection can become a phone booth.

The SkypeIn option allows you to have a local telephone number anywhere in the world. For example, my Skype number could be a Los Angeles 310 area code number that would ring my computer.

Callers could keep in touch with me at local rates no matter where I was. A three-month subscription (which comes with free voice mail) for a local number is $12; a one-year is $38.

*

The good and the bad

THERE’S also a call-forwarding option with SkypeIn. That means you could have your SkypeIn number forwarded to your hotel or any other number at your destination (including a cellphone with free incoming calls).

Your callers will be charged for a local call to your SkypeIn number. You would be charged only the cost of forwarding the call.

The one downside of Skype I found: When an Internet connection was slow, there was a noticeable delay, not unlike a poor quality cellphone connection.

Skype does not bill itself as a replacement for all land-line uses.

But the superior voice quality, ease of use and cheap long distance rates make it attractive. After all, what’s not to love about a 10-cent call to London?

*

To contact James Gilden, e-mail james.gilden@latimes .com.