Skype (cheap/free p2p telephony)

MuFu

Chief Spastic Baboon
Veteran
www.skype.com

Anybody else use this?

My family is split between the UK and Malaysia and we've been trying it out recently. Works very well indeed - seems to be more reliable and better quality than voice-over-MSN, at least. It's completely ad/spyware-free (AFAIK) and the charges for calling foreign landlines are very reasonable. It's cheaper for us to call my grandparents in KL than it is to call someone in the UK during the day!

MuFu.
 
MuFu said:
www.skype.com

Anybody else use this?

My family is split between the UK and Malaysia and we've been trying it out recently. Works very well indeed - seems to be more reliable and better quality than voice-over-MSN, at least. It's completely ad/spyware-free (AFAIK) and the charges for calling foreign landlines are very reasonable.
MuFu.
Thanks for the heads up. Might look into that for our calls abroad now that we have broadband. We currently use Onetel for OS calls: It costs us 4p per min to call Australia from the UK which isn't too bad.

It's cheaper for us to call my grandparents in KL than it is to call someone in the UK during the day!
HA! I saw KL and automatically thought "What? Kings Langley" :)
 
Simon F said:
MuFu said:
www.skype.com

Anybody else use this?

My family is split between the UK and Malaysia and we've been trying it out recently. Works very well indeed - seems to be more reliable and better quality than voice-over-MSN, at least. It's completely ad/spyware-free (AFAIK) and the charges for calling foreign landlines are very reasonable.
MuFu.
Thanks for the heads up. Might look into that for our calls abroad now that we have broadband. We currently use Onetel for OS calls: It costs us 4p per min to call Australia from the UK which isn't too bad.

Yeah, that's pretty good. I'm not sure Skype will be much cheaper, but it's probably worth a look if you make a lot of calls.

It's cheaper for us to call my grandparents in KL than it is to call someone in the UK during the day!
HA! I saw KL and automatically thought "What? Kings Langley" :)

Hehe. A fair guess though - lots of old people in Kings!
 
IIRC Skype use a proprietary mp3 like encoding in a closed/proprietary network.

IMHO the best VoIP phones are the ones that use the SIP/ g.729 standards (one time charge). The g.729 use only 8kbits/sec of bandwith :)
Also with the g.729 B (silence supression) the bandwith is reduced to 4kbps average.

Try www.fwd.pulver.com for a good/free VoIP service.
I use the X-Pro (XTen-Pro 2.0) softphone and the Grandstream Budge Tone-100 phone with my aDSL 256/128 connection while downloading/uploading/browsing and it works great :D

Hope this help
 
Dunno I'm thinking about gettin' rid of Verizon: converting my Speakeay DSL to Speakeasy's OneLink (no need for landline anymore) and order Vonage, keeping my current number... 8) They've got pretty good international rates too: http://www.vonage.com/intrates.php
 
hehehe . . . there was this account about how cheap these companies were,,

it then mentioned,, ALL automatic customer support/complaints and to make the billing cheap it's done via a rolling direct debit which you can't cancel only they can :-O . .

so i guess caveat emptor!
 
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