By Paula Bender

With VoIP your phone is connected to your computer DSL line, thus giving it the same bandwidth and speed along with unlimited minutes anytime. Siemens

Internet phone service makes sense for Hawaii because we’re always looking for a way to reach out without excess charges.

Both Time Warner Cable and Vonage offer Hawaii residents the latest trend in telephony: Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. Hawaiian Telcom is currently working on expanding its DSL service, and this isn’t yet marketed from their Web site at www.hawaiiantel.com.

Vonage provides virtual guidance as you set up your own service with them. They also provide a choice of area codes, except for one in Hawaii. But if you live in the Islands and most of your calls are made to and from a different state, then selecting that area code would save you and your callers plenty of money. Oceanic provides free installation of an adapter box, can assure all phones in the house, including wireless, are connected, and allows you to retain your own phone number.

VoIP makes sense if your home or business already has a high-speed Internet connection and you want to see about reducing your long-distance phone bills.

Arthur Shak, a retired military engineer residing in Kailua, is a Vonage customer. Shak is an example of a senior citizen who embraces high technology. He’s got an Internet presence with several Web sites, has children and grandchildren on the Mainland and in Hawaii, and found VoIP to answer his needs quite efficiently. Shak said he didn’t find it difficult to set up his own VoIP system, but you get the feeling that you could throw him into a room with a bunch of computer parts and he’d be online in about an hour.

“I have a son in Long Beach, California, so that’s where my Vonage area code is,” Shak said. “I use the service because I make about four hours of conference calls a week.”

Shak, a purveyor of health supplements on the Internet, said he has heard of only one instance where a call was refused because it was being made across the Internet. And sometimes the sound loses quality, especially if there’s a lot of traffic such as multi-media transmissions going on simultaneously across the broad-band connection.

If you give him the time, Kiman Wong, Oceanic Time Warner Cable’s general manager of digital telephone service, can wax poetic about the evolution of this still-developing phenomenon. He says it all started with adventurous techno geeks adding speakers, microphones and mini cams to their computers to reach out to one another because, well, no one else had the equipment.

“Then people didn’t want to have to have their computers on to make a phone call from where the computer was,” Wong said. “So they invented this adapter, and the broadband plugs in on one side and the phone on the other. You don’t even need the computer.”

There are so many options and fun little accessories that it’s even possible for those traveling to access VoIP on the road.

VoIP makes sense if your home or business already has a high-speed Internet connection and you want to see about reducing your long-distance phone bills. It also accommodates conference calls, choice of area codes, voice mail, caller ID and call waiting. Oceanic bundles its high-speed Internet, video, local and long-distance services into several price points tailored to the homeowner, the telecommuter and the business professional. There are so many options and fun little accessories, that it’s even possible for those traveling to access the service.

Wong admits to having a land telephone line, a cellular phone and the Oceanic DSL VoIP service. With good reason — should a power outage occur, your digital phone won’t be available until power is restored. Dabble with the new, but it doesn’t hurt to keep a few other dependable devices around when the lights go out. HS