Many popular services, like Vonage, Skype, and a host of smaller companies offer “voice over IP” of VoIP in lieu of regular phone service. The principle benefit to the consumer or business is cost savings over conventional telephone service.

Our experience with this technology is very mixed. We have a Vonage router configured at one location running over high speed ADSL service. This service is prone to network congestion and even something as simple as sending a large email attachment can bring VoIP communication to a grinding halt. Suddenly, you can hear the person at the other end of the call, but they cannot hear you. The problem is that ADSL typically has a lower capacity for outgoing traffic than it does for incoming, which is fine for most web browsing and downloading, but VoIP requires capacity in both directions.

Others use cable broadband modems with somewhat better results, although delays do occur and once again traffic from email and file uploads can consume all the capacity leaving the phone useless.

Businesses are faring better because they can configure quality of service for VoIP communications and allow that traffic to have priority in their network. But a business VoIP phone system can be expensive to implement and is generally reserved for those who have multiple locations and an internal dedicated network.

With enough data speed on the links, we have seen both Vonage and Skype perform well enough to be indistiguishable from conventional telephone service. In an earlier article, we reviewed an excellent headset that makes Skype perform very well, assuming a fast enough Internet connection.

The traveling telecommuter is watching this space very closely, because we rely on the portability of the VoIP network to allow us to work from anyplace there is an Internet connection, but results have been frequently disappointing, especially from Europe, where connection speeds tend to be lower. But one of our friends travels to China frequently and uses his Vonage phone with great results, so we are optimistic. As they say, “your mileage may vary.”

When selecting office computers for daily use, there is a dilemma between cost and functionality. Non-portable desktops and towers are much less expensive than most laptops. Data capacity on laptop disk systems comes at a pretty price and with today’s data hungry applications, especially audio and video, it can be difficult to configure a laptop that can handle day to day office needs and still be portable enough to take the office with you on the road.

We have used Sony Vaio laptops for years with overall good results. Sony has excellent service that will repair and reload the laptop if it experiences disk problems, which seem to be the real weakness of most laptop systems. Combined with a docking station and some good USB externals, the VAIO premium line combines lightweight functionality with adequate compute power for most of our needs. Especially when traveling to remote areas of Africa in small planes, every ounce was important, but we had to have a laptop to help us process digital photographs and create backups of the huge quantities of images we were collecting.

Later in this series, we will discuss the peripherals that make a laptop really useful as a desktop computer, but the one mandatory item that should be purchased with the laptop is a docking station. Without the ability to use a full size monitor and keyboard while in the office, trying to use a laptop for an office computer can be frustrating.

There are three major cell phone technologies in use in the United States. Verizon and Sprint use CDMA technology, Nextel uses iDen technology, and Cingular and T-Mobile use GSM. If you stay within the U.S. exclusively and do not anticipate using your phone outside the country, the CDMA carriers will give you better coverage and stronger signals. So if you rarely leave the U.S. coverage area, choosing one of the CDMA providers probably makes sense.

With the exception of some parts of Asia, the rest of the world uses GSM exclusively. Thus it makes sense to consider one of the GSM carriers in the U.S. Signal reception seems to work pretty well in most markets and the phone can be used in a huge internationl footprint.

One of the unique aspects of the GSM phone is the removable chip or SIM that contains information specific to the provider, such as phone number and settings. Although discouraged by most U.S. carriers by “locking” the phone to refuse to accept other SIMs, it is quite easy to obtain codes to “unlock” most of these phones.

The advantage to this design is the ability to obtain prepaid cellular service within the country where you are visiting. Especially if you will interacting a lot with the locals, having a local cell phone number makes you easy to communicate with, while roaming with your U.S. number makes it expensive for both parties. This is because the model in Europe and other parts of the world is to charge the caller for the entire cost of the call and make it free for the one recieving. But if you are traveling with a U.S. GSM phone, you will pay for the minutes at an elevated rate.

Even when it is not advantageous to obtain prepaid service on a seperate chip, it is nice to be able to use your phone for a quick check of voice mail, or to contact home. While in the Grenadines last spring, we were able to keep in touch with our businesses even from the sailboat as we came in close to islands.

One of the challenges of owning a small business is being able to take a vacation or work remotely without losing the ability to service customers. This is particularly true if there is a product involved which you are shipping out yourself. There are many services available to handle order fullfillment, but many small businesses choose to keep packaging and shipping orders in-house if volume is low or margins tight. One solution we have used is to generate online shipping labels using the major services; US Post Office has Click N Ship and DHL, FedEx and UPS all offer online services to generate mailing labels and pay for the postage.

The advantage to this for the small business is to be able to process orders and prepare the shipping labels remotely, then print them to a service like J2 (which we use for electronic fax). The software from J2 will capture any print to a file so it can be mailed to someone else in a graphics format like TIFF. We give a friend a supply of product pre-packaged and they just print the label and tape it onto a package. Of course, more complex product mixes will require more work on the part of the “hands back home”.

The best part about using US Post Office Click-N-Ship is that you get free delivery confirmation, and have a historical record of shipping packages and payments. This makes the accounting for shipment costs much easier and we use it whether traveling or at home.

When going on vacation, most people used to leave the pets behind at home or at a kennel. Now in the increasingly competetive world of luxury hotels, many of them not only welcome pets, they pamper them as well. The Four Seasons chain has had a long standing policy of accepting smaller pets, but some other chains, such as Loews are upping the ante. With massages, trips to the beach for surfing and room service, pets enjoy their vacation as much as their families.

Now if we could just find them some vacation attire…

See a video clip on this subject at MSN video click here for more.