Chris Barton: A little pain, a great big communication gain

COMMENT

I've been thinking about it for ages. The big snip. But as the day for the cut comes closer, I find I'm suffering anxiety attacks. When I told the family about it, the anxiety spread. "Noooo ... , you can't do that," they cried.

I'm talking about cutting my Telecom line. The problem isn't the quality of the new service I've been trying out for the past month. On the contrary, ihug's phone and internet service via Wired Country's infrastructure is actually very good.

My phone works just like my Telecom line. Talking on it, you wouldn't know I'm using something called voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology. Or that the first leg of the call is travelling through the air to the Sky Tower from a newly installed aerial on the roof on my house. And at two megabits per second (Mbps) the fast internet service following the same wireless pathway is blisteringly fast.

The service is saving me money, too - $30 a month less on my monthly phone rental and internet charges (at the slower 256 kilobits per second service I'm likely to opt for) and about $30 a month less again with cheaper toll and land to mobile charges. Yes, $60 a month.

The anxiety comes because to get all this, I have to give up my phone number. Though I've been living in the same house for 20 years with the same phone number that I have long regarded as mine, it isn't mine at all. It belongs to Telecom. So to get a better and cheaper service, I have to pay a price.

I've talked to people in Wellington who have long had the option of cheaper services from TelstraClear.

"Cut the umbilical cord," they say. Like birth, it may seem turbulent and terrifying at the time, but when it's all over a new and exciting world awaits.

The 12-year-old has been trying out ihug's features and discovered the wonders of conference calling. Now she can have two friends on the phone at the same time, and simultaneously be talking to several others via Microsoft Messenger on the internet - a virtual party.

She's quite impressed with the other phone services as well - call waiting, call forwarding, voice mail etc. And that it can all be managed from a personal website. Just click on name in the address book and it dials the number automatically.

Cool. Also, if there's someone you don't want to hear from, you can make sure all calls from that number go direct to voice mail.

True, you can get some of these services from Telecom. But they're not nearly as nifty as this and cost an arm and leg. With ihug I can get the whole lot for $9.95 a month.

My daughter is sold. We can change numbers as long as she can have conference calling. Our new ihug phone number lets us keep the last three digits of our old number so there is some link with the past.

Monika is looking forward to future VoIP services such as the phone ringing with her personally selected ring tone when it's from one of her friends. I'm looking forward to that, too, because it means I won't have to answer the phone so much.

My partner is suffering like me - but she says the emotion is more like grief. But she loves the internet speed we're now getting - great for watching news clips and videos.

It may be an affordable option for us because for the same amount we're now paying Telecom for a phone, call minder and a128 kilobit per second (Kbps) net trickle, we could get ihug's phone with its added services and 1Mbps internet.

To ease the trauma of losing our number we have two choices. Pay Telecom $22.50 a month to have calls to our old number forwarded to the new one. Or accept ihug's free offer to have those calls forwarded for three months to a message telling callers of the change.

Not that it's free for ihug, which has to pay Telecom a $17.50 set-up fee and 0.5c a minute for its forwarding trouble.

Fortunately, the anger one feels at Telecom's blatantly anti-competitive behaviour and contempt for consumers' rights is just the cure one needs for anxiety about changing numbers. Better still, I don't need to get mad, I can now get even. Snip.

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