The Importance of Being Connected

The key to whether this works, at least on the technology side, will be the Internet experience. The place we're staying in Siracusa includes high-speed Internet service in the rental rate – unlimited access and, according to our land lady, 8 megabits per second, which if true is faster than the service I have in Canada. Pinella, our land lady, also assures us it’s very reliable.

It better be. I use the Internet for virtually everything, most importantly for telephony. I will be using voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) to conduct phone interviews and call customers, family and friends - as I do much of the time here in Canada. To the people I call, it will appear as if I’m phoning them from North America.

Among the many unofficial sponsors of the project is Primus Canada, which is providing complimentary hosted PBX service. I’ll be writing more about the Primus service as I start using it, first here, then in Italy. To make it work, I’ll be taking an adapter the size of a small box of chocolates. It plugs into the wireless network router in the Siracusa apartment. Then I'll plug a regular phone into the adapter. The phone will work like any telephone company phone – dial tone, normal dialing procedures, etc.

The fact that VoIP is a fairly well proven technology doesn’t mean using it this way is a slam dunk. VoIP services are known to degrade when the signal has to travel over long distances or through many different relay points, especially when it has to travel over the often congested open Internet. Primus says it has business customers in a few overseas locations successfully using the service in the way I’m planning to use it. We’ll see.

As a back-up, I’ll also be using service from Skype, the free-or-dirt-cheap Internet phone service now owned by eBay. I’ve almost always had good success with Skype, another unofficial sponsor, but relying on it day to day for business calling will put it to the test.