Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones reviewed by Robert Pritchett 

Author: James E. Gaskin 

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/2137

O'Reilly 

http://www.oreilly.com

Booksite: 

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/talk/chapter/index.html

Released: July 2005 

Pages: 272 

$20 USD, $28 CND,   13 GBP,   12 Euro 

ISBN: 0596009607 

Strengths: VoIP for the non telco geek. 

Weaknesses: Focus on Vonage and Skype, mostly. 

Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones by James E. Gaskin pokes fun at the existing 

telcos and delights in sticking it to them with Voice over IP options in this short 9 chapter book. 

If you have either DSL or cable service for broadband connections, moving to VoIP should be an 

easy activity. James Gaskin devotes a lot of attention and tries to balance between two leaders in 

the current VoIP market; Vonage (phone centric) and Skype (computer centric). I use both and 

experiment with others, so you may see I enjoyed reading what he had to say. 

And   surprise!   he shows how you are already using VoIP without your knowledge. 

James does a great job comparing costs between legacy phone systems and broadband options 

and also asks the right questions regarding quality of service, reliability and 911 services. 

What I like most about the book is that he attempts to not get in too deeply into the acronym 

happy telco speak, prevalent in the industry. 

An area that he also points out is the Telco inroads being made by the incumbents into Internet 

services. And may I make an observation he neglected to mention? Telcos service customers like 

stallions service mares   and that is why millions of people have been moving to broadband dial 

tone.  

This book is a great entry level intro to VoIP. 

  MPN, LLC 2005 macCompanion 

Page 52 

August 2005, Volume 3 Issue 8