Skype: P2P telephony
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General | 2 Comments
I've recently used Skype as a way to get in touch with friends instead of using older methods such as MSN, and I have to say that it's amazing. The whole thing works based on a P2P (peer-to-peer) technology similar to the one used in popular filesharing P2P apps such as Kazaa or eDonkey but instead of sending music files or the latest w4r3z, we are sending voice.
I have to say that the quality is amazingly good, even better than a traditional phone. However, due to the unreliability of the IP network sometimes the sound will be totally screwed (garbled sound, cuts and silences in the middle of a conversation, etc) But when it works well (around 85% of the time) it does work well! If you would like to save some money when communicating with your friends, give it a try 
There are clients for Windows, Linux and OSX even though the Windows client is the most advanced and supports things like group conversations. The Linux and OSX clients are still under development and can be considered beta quality but work quite well nevertheles... Finally, you can also make calls to normal fixed phones and mobile phones via Skype by paying a small fee per minute, something they call SkypeOut credit. I don't think that 1.7 eurocents/minute is not so much compared with normal telephony rates...
Comments
2 Comments
Well...
In france you have de FreeBox ;) For 29.99€ par month you have 6Mb adsl acces (3Mb when TV is on), free and ilimited local calls and TV :D
I think that the price for a minute is expencif
I don't think 0.17Ä/min is *that* expensive... though I am not planning to use it anyway since my company pays my phone bills :) Besides, you can call from skype to skype for free and the quality is quite good even if you're on dialup (yeah, modems... that is soooo 90s!!) You don't need a 6mb ADSL to have good sound quality ;)