Mark is on a yearlong walkabout, quitting his job, seeing the world, following Fred's Rules of Travel. He's now blogging his American travels after a year in India.  Mark's discovered SkypeIn is useful for the homeless traveler. I like his observations about using a phone number to establish US identity. Excerpt:

As I am still a homeless traveler in the U.S., this service may still be useful to me. At the moment the prepaid T-Mobile SIM card on my mobile phone is out of the T-Mobile network range. So people could call me on the Skype number.

The real clincher is that calls may be forwarded from Skype to another number. So I can forward calls to the number of the house I am staying at or to my mobile phone if I know it will be in range. If the call is not answered Skype voicemail will pick up the call. Since I get a new SIM card and, consequently, a new mobile phone number each time I change countries, forwarding phone calls from a single U.S. phone number could be very useful for keeping in touch with people in the U.S.

This service is really useful as a U.S. number to leave for banks, credit card companies, and online retail companies. All of these entities want a U.S. phone number at which someone can be reached. Leaving an international number generally is not acceptable. If I had a SkypeIn number registered with all of my financial institutions when I was in India, I perhaps would have found out about outstanding credit card fraud more quickly when my wallet was stolen in New Delhi.

In short, the service lets someone have a permanent U.S. phone number that they can use, maintain, and check while they are in another country for long periods of time. It is usually not possible -- and it is almost always not economically sensible -- to maintain a U.S. landline or mobile phone if someone is going to be out of the country for more than three months. Maintaining an identity for financial and tax purposes in the U.S. is partly dependent upon maintaining a phone number.

Technorati tags: skype, skypein, voicemail, identity, digitalid, forwarding, id