Marvellous Intercontinental Telephony

Well, that was interesting…

Every week Johnny and I get together over the phone with our colleagues at Yankee to discuss the progress of our various projects.

We’re used to these conference calls bringing in assorted far flung: while the Yankee folks are clustered in rural Dublin, NH, often some of their team are traveling and dial in from places like Washington or Florida. And Johnny was in Vancouver until a year ago, so we were at least tri-coastal for several years.

Today, however, was the first time I’d participated in the conference call while sitting in the stone-walled attic of a medieval townhouse in the south of France.

Here’s how it worked.

Yankee called Johnny on our Peterborough, NH VoicePulse Connect voice-over-IP DID number, which routed the call over the Internet to our Asterisk server in Charlottetown. Once he received that call on his phone in the office, Johnny flipped the switchhook and dialed the number of my Orange mobile phone here in France, with the international call going out via VoicePulse Connect as well (at about 30 cents/minute).

I answered, Johnny flipped the switchhook again, and, le voila, we were all connected. Three countries, two continents, three telephony technologies.

At least on my end, the quality of the call was surprisingly good; I didn’t feel like Wolf Blitzer on the line from Iraq — there wasn’t an “overseas echo” or a perceptible delay (although there probably was a delay; it just wasn’t that noticeable in the rough and tumble of the conference call). I’ll have to wait for reports from Dublin and Charlottetown to see what I sounded like on their end.

This experimental month in France is about many things, one of which is testing the whole “I’m a digital worker and can work anywhere” thesis. So far, it seems to be working out okay. At least if you set aside having to stand in front of a tree to pick up my email.

More from the frontier as things develop…