* Illustration: Don Clark * Not anytime soon, bub. But when you eventually get your iPhone 4G, they should be included in your rate plan.
Which is weird, because it's probably been a long time since you nervously eyed the clock while on the phone with your granny in Smallville. Long distance has been all-you-can-eat since cell phones and voice-over-IP conquered the universe. But international telephony—whether landline, cellular, or Internet-based—is still a piggybank-rattling affair: Providers just can't offer dirt-cheap calls across borders.
The problem is that there's no such thing as an international telephone network. As your voice travels the lines from, say, Venice, California, to Venice, Italy, it encounters a lot of tollbooths. You pay your local provider to let you hop on the wire, and you pay a termination fee to whoever owns the network at the other end. If you cross another country's wires along the way, you have to pay them, too.
The Web, on the other hand, is, well, worldwide—and that should mean no more checkpoint charlies. Unfortunately, even if you're using VoIP, you're often calling someone who's using a traditional line. So the termination fees remain. That's why Skype calls to cellular and landline numbers can still be as expensive as $1.40 a minute. (Sucks to be you, East Timor expats.)
But if you're talking Skype to Skype, you don't pay anything. And that's the direction mobile phones are heading as well. With the explosion of wireless broadband options, cellular providers are evolving into VoIP companies. Once both ends of the conversation are on the Net, connection fees will become relics of the early modern age. "When 4G networks become ubiquitous in a couple of years, people won't be paying for overseas calling," says Christopher Collins, a networking analyst at the Yankee Group. "It'll be just another service embedded in a holistic data plan."
That will be a completely new way of doing business for cellular providers. "At that point, they'll be competing to add services," Collins says. Which means that free, unlimited international calling will just be the start. Get ready for a torrent of free services in its wake.
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