by Michelle Lentz
When I think of video calling, I think of two things:
- The Jetsons. The image above seems to be seared into my brain and permanently attached to the phrase “video calling.” You should see what happens when I picture hovercraft.
- I’m vain. This is the second thing I think of. I remember that, because I work at home, I’m in pajamas longer than your average bear and I avoid make-up when possible. I avoid webcams.
I need to get over it. The phone in the Jetsons future is here. It’s affordable and available to the masses. Better yet: it’s a apparently a great product.
Vidtel, launched by Scott & Mariette Wharton, is video calling made easy. Scott has been in the telecommunications industry for a long time and always saw VOIP as the future. They created Vidtel out of a a setup they initially created for home use. They liked it so much, they wanted to share.
To use Vidtel, you need a reliable high-speed Internet connection. They will send you the phone (around $200) and you pick a plan. Plans run $15/month for standard service, $25/month for premium with the only difference being simultaneous ring (ringing to multiple numbers at once). That’s it! It’s meant to replace your regular land line, as it provides all the benefits of the land line with the added plus of having the video screen to visually chat with other Vidtel customers.
It’s Vidtel’s hope to eventually enable video chat with customers of any video calling service, but they aren’t there yet. I was giving serious thought to investing in one of these, and sending another to my best friend in Florida. Then I remembered my Internet connection. It’s high-speed, but it’s far from reliable. (Thanks Insight, for all the outages this week.) Brian’s unsolicited endorsement above lets me know that sound quality, occasionally an issue with VOIP, isn’t an issue this time.
This is affordable video calling. I can only imagine that, as more and more people adopt it, it will become even moreso. As Brian said to me, “See what you’ve been missing.” What can I say? The Jetsons have arrived.
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