Besides, I didn’t say that it saved time, or that it’s easier to use. It really doesn’t for the guy with a phone on his desk; the time and cost savings with corporate VoIP pretty much come down to only having to maintain a data network instead of parallel voice and data wiring throughout your offices, and being able to tie branch offices (including teleworkers) together without having to rent circuits. These are huge advantages from the perspective of an overworked corpcomm/IT department.

To the typical office worker, it’s just a phone that works like every other phone they’ve ever used, and that’s a feature.

On the LiveJournal side of things, VoIP means that they’re able to offer a lot of local numbers for the phone-posting service, which I admit to not entirely understanding but was apparently enough for a competitor to build a business on. Without VoIP you’d have a Seattle number, and that’s about it. While the current set of 400-odd numbers is still geographically limited (east coast US), they’ve only got one VoIP termination service involved so far, and as more are brought on that’ll get fixed.

So at the corporate side, it’s about saving time and money by being easier to deploy and manage; on the LiveJournal side, it’s about providing a service to areas in which it would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to do so for pennies per minute. But it’s just VoIP in production, and I think it’s neat to see the technologies that pay for my food and shelter being used in the real world for a bunch of neat new things, especially when they’re being used transparently. The advantages of VoIP are pretty boring from a consumer point of view, but that’s OK, because bells and whistles aren’t why it’s neat.

Of course, I won’t be offended if you skip over my stuff about VoIP if it doesn’t interest you.

Whenever I hear someone describing how some new technology saves time or is easier to use, I quietly laugh and shake my head.

You’re my hero.

I need to start playing with VoIP pretty soon.