VoIP has been around for a while now. I know this because I spent large chunks of the first five years of my career promoting providers of Voice over Internet Protocol technology.

The concept is simple and pretty compelling. When you use a traditional phone line, your conversation occupies the whole line for 100% of the time that you are making the call. This isn’t a very efficient use of the line: voices aren’t very taxing on the capacity of the line and there are lots of silences in conversations. Imagine a road being closed so that a single car can drive down it and you get the idea.

By contrast, Internet traffic is very efficient. Every job – a download, a request for a web page, a video stream or a voice call – is broken up into lots of little packets. These packets are then packed tightly down the line and reassembled into their respective parts at the other end. Think of normal road traffic – lots of different vehicles carrying different things to their respective locations.

Because it makes more efficient use of capacity, it is much cheaper to carry things like voice calls over the Internet. Hence why services such as Skype can offer free free calls between Skype users – the marginal cost of carrying the calls approaches zero. Of course we don’t always want to be sat at our computers when making phone calls, and that’s where products like the FREETALK Connect Me Skype adaptor come in.

This little black box plugs into your normal (analogue) phone line, your home phone, and your broadband router. It then allows you to make some or all calls over Skype instead of your normal phone line. You can specify classes of call that should be made over Skype (e.g. International) or just hit a key code before dialling to choose which calls should go over Skype and which should be ‘normal’. Finally, you can add speed dial codes to call Skype users from your home phone.

This all works well: setup is straightforward and self-explanatory, with just six steps in the quick start guide and the rest handled with an on-screen wizard. Functionally this product works, and the price is right, starting at £34.99 with 300 minutes of international calls. So why only three stars?

Because I’m not wholly convinced that anyone wants or needs this. For a start, most of us have mobiles now and if you’re on a reasonable tariff you get lots of free minutes. Sure calling abroad can be expensive but if you do it a lot then you’re going to just get an international calling card or pre-pay with your home phone provider (£2.99/month for unlimited calls to international destinations from TalkTalk for example, if it’s not already included in your package). If you do want to use Skype it’s usually for the additional features – presence, video calling, text messaging, screensharing, filesharing, conference calls. All things you can’t get on your old house phone, so why would you choose to use it?

I can think of just two applications for this device and they are both predicated on a lack of understanding from the ultimate user. If someone wanted to Skype a technically illiterate relative regularly, they might choose to add this to their relative’s phone rather than try to teach them to use a PC. And if a company was using Skype, it might want to have some standard handsets for certain applications where PCs and headsets weren’t practical.

Beyond these the only reason I can think of to buy this is the sheer geeky fun of it, and that I’m afraid, is just not enough.