Creek Running North

I have friends in Romania who have it. We talked for almost an hour this weekend. But we also got cut off three times, there was a delay like an old-time ship-to-shore call, and there was a lot of feedback—I could hear my own voice on the delay at first, then somebody else’s conversation very dimly.

But the call TO them was free—one full hour—so I offer the comment as information, not a complaint.

I use it with a couple of people. The best thing about it is it’s free.

Computer to computer is fabulous and better than a phone line (and free!). Computer to landline is meh, kinda hard to hear. Computer to cell phone is nearly impossible.

Check the family site. Jodi & Mart use it all the time back & forth between NYS & New Zealand, said it is clearer than a real phone, and is free!

I use it to keep in touch with my brother in Colorado (I’m in Florida).  I’ve only used it computer-to-computer, but the quality is generally excellent.

OK, based on the above, I qualify my comment: Our call was cordless home phone to computer.

And I should’ve said that I’ve mainly used it in computer-to-computer calls. The quality is generally pretty good after the first fifteen seconds or so, when there tends to be some echo.

Have we mentioned that it’s free?

I hated it.  Echoes, delay… it felt as though I had to start talking and wait for it to start relaying my voice, and then I’d have to start over again.

As soon as it wasn’t free anymore, I got rid of it.  (It’s $30 a year; not free, but not expensive if you make a lot of international calls.)

Anyway, download it, try it out. They’ll give you 5 minutes free.

i got the $15 deal for the year. i use it to call my girlfriend in canada from LA.

it is better computer-to-computer, but try to avoid using wireless. connection speed and consistency are important. sometimes if you get a crappy, echo-y connection, hanging up and trying again helps.

quality overall is pretty lame, but the price is pretty much unbeatable, so… it does the trick.

We use it when Bob’s in Brazil.  He set up an account a few months ago.

I’m not overly thrilled with it, except that it’s a cheap call to Brazil, or actually, to Bob at a computer in Brazil.

He’s called a few times, and there were audio problems.  I don’t know if it was the headset he was using, or the connection.  We’ve used it computer-to-phone, and computer-to-computer.

I’ve tried calling him, but I never know when he’s going to be at a computer, so I’ve left voice mail messages.  One time I got lucky, though.  I called right when he logged on.

On the versatility of Skype in January of 2005—

As usual, I’m writing this in the sky, flying from New York City to Rio de Janeiro this time. Below me, Amazonia is waking to first light. Only three days ago, I flew from London to New York. It has become so routine for me to dash across half the planet that it feels a bit like commuting. Or taking some kind of rapid horizontal elevator. While I haven’t entirely lost my sense that such mobility is a miracle, most people take for granted that about 95% of the earth’s locations are, at most, a day a half away from them. Now we measure distance in money not time. The rigors of the road, so daunting even 75 years ago, are less an obstacle than the cost of the ticket. Marco Polo would be stunned.

As with most miracles, the functional elimination of distance became invisible to us almost as soon as it happened. The planet shrank by several orders of magnitude and most of us adapted at once. But I had an experience - or rather, two experiences - the night I arrived from London which made it seem that the earth had shrunk to a point of global intimacy. Indeed, they felt like that first mystical moment the Internet provided me many years ago, when I realized that I could type “telnet” at a terminal prompt and cause any number of hard disks to spin all over the world.

In any event, I was sitting at my desk in New York on Wednesday night, writing a BarlowSpam, when Skype started to emit the old-fashioned bell tone that signals a request for a voice chat. I looked at the window associated with the request and saw a bunch of Chinese pictograms where the name should be. Some kind of Asian chatspam, I figured, and I ignored it. A few minutes later, it rang again. The name of the caller was “Kitty11_3”. There was also a text chat box on the screen, also from kitty11_3 which read, “I need a friend.” I was skeptical. I figured that “Kitty,” or whomever, was probably looking for “friends” to come see her “relax” in her web-cam equipped “bedroom.” But I took the call. A delicate Asian-sounding voice came from someplace in Cyberspace. “Will you talk to me?” she said.

If you are comp to comp on a DSL line (not wireless) I think you will have no complaints. The only other hitch is getting the mic and speaker set-up smoothed out. This is the cause of some looped delay and feedback or echo. I use it often and it is good.

I use Skype often. I’ve had no problems with calling computer to computer, but I agree with everyone else that calling computer to cell or landline can be shitty sometimes. I used Skype yesterday to call into Radio Free Pandagon and I was not happy with the reception or quality it produced, but I also have to wonder if it wasn’t at least partly because I’m using a cheap headset. Amanda says that she gets better sound quality using Skype to call in so I have to think that my own problems with Skype have more to do with my hardware than with the service itself.

Skype is still free if you call computer-to-computer to someone else who has Skype.

And Skype has a few nifty features. It’s the only chat program that I use, and it’s convenient to talk and chat at the same time. If I’m referring someone to a website or I want to share a photo, I can send a link or a file while I’m talking on Skype.

I can’t say enough good things about it. My brother lives in Australia, so it’s saved me quite a bit of money. Sometimes, the quality of the call will deteriorate after a few minutes, but this is remedied by hanging up and calling back.

chris clarke....I knew carrie scott and janna bruce…

I have this headset and use Skype to talk to friends in Indiana and Brazil (from CA).  I’ve never used it in a non computer-to-computer context, but doggone, it sounds absolutely fantastic.  Way better than a telephone. 

That said, I’ve heard the mixed reviews that are echoed here about mixing Skype and telephones, so I have to say I’ve been a little wary of, e.g., rolling back my cell phone plan and using Skype when I’m at home.

In the computer-to-computer context, though, it’s totally free of charge and super-duper handy.

I use SkypeOut when I travel internationally and have since at least 2003. Places I’ve used it from include Alberta, Zurich, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai (again).

At 2c/minute, I have no complaints. The only calls that weren’t at least as good as an all-too-often-mediocre domestic cellular call were some of the ones from China, and that surely had little do with Skype and a lot to do with the lousy first-mile: the so-called broadband that most hotels and cafes in China have, especially for outbound data.

Even using SkypeOut to call my lazy friends in the States who can’t be bothered to download the software so we can talk for free while I’m in Japan, I’m paying less for long distance/international calls here in Fukuoka than I ever did in Dunkirk.  Only problem is it can’t call customer help lines, so unless I want to use the cell and pay out the nose, I can’t get my online bank account unlocked.  Oh, and sometimes the sound quality on SkypeOut is bad.

Skype uses proprietary encryption and uses individual machines as routing nodes.

For the encryption, I’d want to know what my machine is sending - or at least participating in routing.

For the routing nodes, a mom and dad non-tech savvy user could find their bandwidth unfairly monopolised by Skype routing.  Although the consent is implied in the Conditions and Terms, in the case of some isps, this could result in heavy excess charges - and for most new users, Skype use would be the last suspect.
Those with firewalled and well maintained machines can, of course, use Skype with very low bandwidth **at the expense of others who are routing supernodes**, so Skype is not free, in the sense of free for all users. 

There are much more economical VoIP plans, on better controlled and serviced networks, than SkypeOut (calls to the POTS).

The marketing is superb, and clearly very effective.  Much hardware is moved through the Skype site.

I tested it over a 3 month period in all kinds of service and with low and high bandwidth connections.
It rarely (less than 10 percent of the duration and less than 8 percent of initialisation of calls) did a straightforward call.

2 out of 10 for ethics and 3 out of ten for consistent performance.
Skype is trype.

Put a Skype address on your calling card and most of my mates would put you in the iPod wanker basket.

Add to above post:

I have no proprietary interest in any phone company or isp (internet service provider) but, in common with most Australians, I am on an eternal quest for comm solutions that are not either frank gouging (our national telco, recently flogged off to highest bidders) or shite quality.