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Compare this and this, then decide.

I did. They have changed the EULA since people were upset about the 'third party software' part. It doesn't seem as evil now, but I'm still so wary that I haven't installed it yet.

From the FAQ SkypeOut (what enables to call external phone numbers) is not enabled for the Linux version, and that could be what makes it worth, or different from other available solutions.... or is something common and widely used?

When Skype come out with their telephone kit that plugs straight into the new BT network will BT cut off people trying to use another handset? They might, but they wont get away with it.

This is going to be the biggest revolution in telephony the UK has ever seen. Whilst a Skype handset might not connect you to phones that are not on their network, if enough people use it, it could supplant the BT network and destroy their business.

I wonder how they are going to charge for the service, obviously line rental, which will be the minimum they will be able to collect from each user, but taking into consideration the ease with which people will be able to switch providers, their churn rate will be very high indeed.

Basically, they are going to spend 3 billion to put themselvs out of business. Great!

It's anonymous, encrypted and P2P.

Instant Messaging included.

Good sound quality.

Disclaimer: I'm not related to Skype in any way, just a happy user

Skype is a growing P2P telephony network. It's made by the same people who made Kazaa. I haven't tested it myself yet.

Skype is a P2P VoIP application that is independant of any central servers, has great quality audio, NAT, etc.

How exactly do they intend to regulate the unregulatable?

For Windows, Skype is a really good over-internet voice chat program. It uses P2P, and the quality you get is really good (atleast if your friend is on a LAN :P, haven't tried it outside the college LAN yet). Version 0.97 is showing some problems. Still, something like this would be really cool on Linux ...

They aren't; they are going after some users of some P2P systems. P2P is a very wide area- with lots of protocols- most of the internet is P2P- the IP protocol itself is P2P. USENET especially is P2P.

Because its used mostly for piracy.

No; well maybe. But that's not necessarily true for all P2P or for all time. For example Skype is P2P, but there's presumably little or no piracy going on there.

Slashdot software failure? Seems to have posted nonsense before. Here is the correct version, edited from a previous comment to another story:

Internet-initiated regular telephone calls: Internet-initiated calls using Bigzoo.com's BigTalk, which cast 3.6 cents per minute to call the U.S. from New Zealand, for example.

Free VOIP: An option if both sides of a call have internet connections is Skype. At present it's free, and provides better quality than normal telephone. Skype is a great way to try VOIP without paying anything. Skype provides AES encryption of your calls, too. Skype can use port 80 for connections, so it can get past any firewall. (This shows the alarming lack of security of firewalls, and the need for a software firewall like ZoneAlarm that alert you when a program tries to connect.) Skype is brought to you by the designers of the original KaZaa program.

3.5 cents per minute, but free to the U.S. caller: If you want someone with only a normal telephone to call you in another country without paying, you can put $10 into a BigZoo.com or OneSuite.com account, and give them the PIN number. OneSuite only costs 3.5 cents per minute from the U.S. to New Zealand, for example, if the U.S. caller calls from a local number. With OneSuite.com or Bigzoo.com can have as many accounts as you have friends for whom you want to provide free calling.

Other ideas? Are there any options like this that aren't mentioned here?

Internet-initiated calls: It may be interesting to compare this to Internet-initiated calls using Bigzoo.com's BigTalk, which cast 3.6 cents per minute to call the U.S. from New Zealand.

Free VOIP: An option if both sides of a call have internet connections is Skype. At present it's free, and provides better quality than normal telephone. Skype is a great way to try VOIP without paying anything. Skype provides AES encryption of your calls, too. Skype can use port 80 for connections, so it can get past any firewall. (This shows the alarming lack of security of firewalls, and the need for a software firewall like ZoneAlarm that alert you when a program tries to connect.) Skype is brought to you by the designers of the original KaZaa program.

3.5 cents per minute, but free to the U.S. caller: If you want someone with only a normal telephone to call you in New Zealand without paying, you can put $10 into a BigZoo.com or OneSuite.com account, and give them the PIN number. OneSuite only costs 3.5 cents per minute from the U.S. to New Zealand, if the U.S. caller calls from a local number. With OneSuite.com or Bigzoo.com can have as many accounts as you have friends for whom you want to provide free calling.

Other ideas? Are there any options like this that aren't mentioned here?

you acknowledge that installation of the skype software will allow third parties who are not affiliated with skyper the ability to communicate with your computer ("outside parties"). you agree that skyper will not be liable for any damage, claim or loss of any kind whatsoever
skype.com/eula.html
no spyware egh ? Morpheus P2P also make a big deal of the fact that it's "doesn't contain spyware" but the reality is it's riddled with it, this is the internet, people lie. these people came up with Kazaa a product built on piracy filled with the worst spyware on the planet and you expect me to trust them?!

trust once lost is rairly gained again and that EULA just confirms their stereotype

how about its not free? , check out the EULA

You acknowledge that certain functions in the Skype Software are only available to paid subscribers after a free trial period of the Skype Software and Services (the "Free Trial Period") ends. After the Free Trial Period ends, you will be presented with the option to subscribe to the Subscription Services. If you do not wish to subscribe, you acknowledge that you can not access functions and services only available to paid subscribers. To subscribe to the Subscription Services you must agree to the terms and conditions of the Subscription Services.

then they effectivly go on to say you ok them from any spyware concerns but unknown 3rd parties will have access to your machine

(c) THE SKYPE SOFTWARE IS UTILIZED AND DISTRIBUTED BY THIRD PARTIES WHICH ARE UNRELATED TO SKYPER. YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT INSTALLATION OF THE SKYPE SOFTWARE WILL ALLOW THIRD PARTIES WHO ARE NOT AFFILIATED WITH SKYPER THE ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR COMPUTER ("OUTSIDE PARTIES"). YOU AGREE THAT SKYPER WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGE, CLAIM OR LOSS OF ANY KIND WHATSOEVER

why are we giving this time again ? next up on slashdot Gator/Claria bring you free VOIP ?

Hey don't rag on them too badly! They are Hiring Linux Developers.
KDEphone here we come!

"If Skype becomes illegal, only criminals will have Skype." (Encrypted VOIP, with better sound quality than telephones, and free, at present.)

Can you supply a reference that demonstrates this at work or post an example?

From "Skype's Website: ...Skype, created by the people who brought you KaZaA"...

I can tell you that being brought to me by the same people who inflicted kazaa on the world sure instills a lot of confidence... Does is come with the b3d projector and save now????

The use is being able to call anyone for free. You can use FWD to call non-U.S. POTS lines. You can also call from land lines to FWD. Netmeeting is H.323-based and doesn't work behind NAT. Since everyone uses NAT, this is bad. SIP however, can be made to work behind NAT. FWD set it up to work behind NAT. I have a free FWD Windows-CE client on my IPAQ. Try that with Netmeeting...

The one drawback with it is that it's not encrypted. Skype is encrypted.

Use Skype, until they ask everyone to pay. Better sound quality than telephone. Works with only Port 80 open. Free.

In a simular fashion, VoIP simply has a lot more potential points of failure than POTS.

It is also reported to have better-than-phone voice quality, even over lossy lines.

"Skype is the next phenomenon from the people who brought you KaZaA. Just like KaZaA, Skype uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to connect you to other users - not to share files this time, but to talk and chat with your friends."

Further on: "Works with all firewall, NAT and routers - nothing to configure!"

Link: Skype

I've been using Skype to talk with a friend in France, from Oregon. The sound quality is excellent, much better than crackly old telephones. The link is computer to computer, and we both have high-speed internet connections.

Also, try OneSuite. 2.5 cents per minute to use a regular, scratchy traditional phone.

Both of these make me realize that the telephone companies are charging too much. When you talk, you are only transferring a few bits of digital information. Everyone's conversations are aggregated into a huge data stream that is very cheap to send by optical fiber.

*free as in Beer

Most people are wrong in when they hear P2P, they think filesharing. A lot of games use P2P techniques to reduce latency. ......

If every packet has to go through the server, you double the latency.

Although I usually do not respond to AC posts, this one is very good. There are other insanely useful applications of P2P. IM and VoIP are both obvious potential users of P2P technologies. Skype was even created by Kazaa. If P2P supporters can argue that outlawing P2P is like outlawing the telephone, then maybe Congress will back off or at least craft very narrow legislation that permits many non-problematic uses of P2P.

Any title, anytime, anywhere - for free. There will be no "Sevice Economy" ~ only revolution.

Skype Shows the way to upgrade Speak Freely. I've been using Skype behind a hardware firewall and NAT that is locked down tight. When Skype found that its preferred port was not open, it simply used Port 80.

The sound quality is better than telephone. I talked to a friend in France for 2 hours yesterday.

But... It would be much better if there were an open source alternative, that could connect directly to the other person's IP, like dialpad.com did. This is a huge need, and I hope someone will accept the challenge. Otherwise the U.S. government's surveillance departments may one day control all communication: Feds Want to Tap VoIP.

As has been pointed out, what we really need are easier solutions such as port forwarding - you could turn the port into an extention number. So your voip could be slashdot.org:5 and then a bit like VNC have traffic routed to slashdot.org port xxxx + 5. For that to work we'd need cooperation from router manufacturers.

The other alternative is IPv6. VoIP might just be the driving force needed to see IPv6 deployed in the real world.

Please DON'T pay attention. Many of us who read this don't have exactly the same problem. It's appropriate to talk about a wide range of solutions. Anyway, maybe he could get his GF or himself an old PC for $20 from the newspaper classified ads. Voice applications don't require much computing power. Skype, below, says 400 MHz is enough.

I just want to connect with friends in France and Brazil. I don't need any standards like SIP. I would just like to use the sound card for sound. I want to avoid use of a server for making connections, because all the companies will soon begin charging for this unnecessary service.

I've never used it, but for the MAC and PC there is the free version of the Xten software. Requires that you connect through someone's server. Free World Dialup was suggested to me.

For the PC, Skype works perfectly. The sound quality is better than regular telephones. However, there are some problems: 1) Skype is made by the same people who made KaZaa. Possibly it has hidden functions like KaZaa does. I've already found that every time it is used it keeps installing itself so that it runs every time the computer is turned on. The download page says, "no spyware, no adware". 2) Skype requires an intermediate server. I would like to connect directly to my friend's IP address. 3) I haven't verified this, but Skype seems to use a hard-coded public key, so that, even though the voice is encrypted, it would be easy for anyone to decrypt.

Skype can communicate through any firewall. If it doesn't find other ports open, it works on port 80. (For those who don't know, that's the HTTP browser port.) It would be great to find some open source software that could do that, because I don't like punching holes in firewalls. (However, if voice can go through port 80, so can absolutely anything else.)

What other "Voice Chat" or "VOIP" software have you used, and what has been your experience?

I looked at the Xten software. I just want to connect with a friend in France. I don't need SIP. I would just like to use the sound card for sound. I want to avoid use of a server for making connections, because all the companies will soon begin charging for this unnecessary service.

Skype works perfectly. The sound quality is better than regular telephones. However, there are some problems: 1) Skype is made by the same people who made KaZaa. Possibly it has hidden functions like KaZaa does. I've already found that every time it is used it keeps installing itself so that it runs every time the computer is turned on. 2) Skype requires an intermediate server. I would like to connect directly to my friend's IP address. 3) I haven't verified this, but Skype seems to use a hard-coded public key, so that, even though the voice is encrypted, it would be easy for anyone to decrypt.

Skype can communicate through any firewall. If it doesn't find other ports open, it works on port 80. (For those who don't know, that's the HTTP browser port.) It would be great to find some open source software that could do that, because I don't like punching holes in firewalls. (However, if voice can go through port 80, so can absolutely anything else.)

Are you associated with Xten? I notice you say, "... our X-Lite softphone...". Your resume looks interesting, but I don't see any mention of XTen.

Skype will be one of the shakers. 5 million downloads, soaring up with exponential curve, still in beta but over constantly over 100K users online at the same time.

Unless they sell it away, there is no reason why Skype would not shake the market similarly as Kazaa did. Expect atleast to see the Telcos to read the law in new and inspiring ways to stop the rush.

I'll stick with skype.

Internet-initiated calls: It may be interesting to compare this to Internet-initiated calls using Bigzoo.com's BigTalk, which cast 3.6 cents per minute to call the U.S. from New Zealand.

Free VOIP: Another option if both sides of a call have internet connections is Skype. At present it's free, and provides better quality than normal telephone. Skype is a great way to try VOIP without paying anything. Skype provides AES encryption of your calls, too. Skype can use port 80 for connections, so it can get past any firewall. (This shows the alarming lack of security of firewalls, and the need for a software firewall like ZoneAlarm that alert you when a program tries to connect.) Skype is brought to you by the designers of the original KaZaa program.

3.5 cents per minute, but free to the U.S. caller: If you want someone with only a normal telephone to call you in New Zealand without paying, you can put $10 into a BigZoo.com or OneSuite.com account, and give them the PIN number. OneSuite only costs 3.5 cents per minute from the U.S. to New Zealand, if the U.S. caller calls from a local number. With OneSuite.com or Bigzoo.com can have as many accounts as you have friends for whom you want to provide free calling.

Other ideas? Are there any options like this that aren't mentioned here?

One thing he mentions that I had not heard about; p2p telephony over at Skype.com. Seems like a pretty cool idea. Hopefully the "stigma" in the general press asscoiated with KaZaa will not harm Skype.

As to "innovation" other than being a highly overused word (especially in the Mac community), I thing it is truly achieved more often by small groups. Bouncing lots of ideas around, quickly, and little thought about what can be done. Your average newcomer doesn't know what s/he can't do, only what s/he wants to do.

Sharman also operates P2P telephony-IM project called Skype I'm just wondering if there is any spyware in it and if so, is anybody going to create something like Skype Lite L++?

Sure it can be encrypted, but there is some fairly significant overhead involved, without crypto hardware, I think you would notice degraded conversation quality.

I am pleased to report that the crypto part is not a problem. According to its documentation, Skype employs a 256-bit AES cipher -- currently sufficient to please even the paranoid -- and on my lowly 400 MHz P3 box such a conversation uses about 40% of the CPU. The sound quality is about the same as POTS and only slightly worse than my Packet 8 service (VOIP).

What surprised me most, however, is that the time-delay with Skype was, to my ears, about the same as with Packet 8! This is fairly easy to test. Call your cell phone from your VOIP phone and put one on the left ear and the other on the right, while making utterances of your choice. If you have two PCs where you can connect one to a VPN (to give the data some distance to travel), you'll be able to do the same with two separate Skype accounts.

Haven't tried it out yet myself, but 3.3+ Megadownloads can't be wrong.

Probably Skype

It's not like it's that much different today, actually.

Today you download whole movies in Kazaa instead of single images in BBS, but the concept is the same. You waste some time, just to find out that it's something crappy.

Today the modem sounds are no longer heard and don't wake anyone, but Skyping with people for hours can.

Just think, a few years from now, you'll say "Voice\Video-on-demand in those days was so difficult!"

This is all nice and all but how the hell are they going to regulate this exactly? Sure it might be easy to target companies like Vonage but what do you do with all the free services out there like Skype or Free World Dialup?

A couple days ago this /. article asked whether price competition would run VoIP-to-POTS companies out of business. It specifically mentioned Packet8, Vonage, and VoicePulse. I've been considering switching to a VoIP-to-POTS provider for quite a while now, and wonder what experience other SlashDotters have had with these or related services. To be specific, I want a solution that lets me use my regular analog phone through my broadband connection to call POTS users (e.g. my mom) AND gives me a phone # for others to call me. Solutions like Net2Phone (which I've used for years) or Skype that require me to use headphones/mic in front of my computer just don't cut it. Nor do I want to buy any new hardware (like SIPphone requires). Recent /. articles discuss Skype Vs. SIPphone and Other VoIP issues, but none contain the sort of info I'm looking for. What advice can you give about cost, performance, security, ease-of-setup, etc?

I'm not saying that any of the companies below actually employ the platforms listed in their VoIP applications/implementations, but I definately think it's interesting to see the comparison (IBM vs Mainstream Market).

Packet8 runs Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
WebPhone.com runs Microsoft-IIS/6.0 on Windows Server 2003.
Sonexis runs Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
Skype runs Apache on FreeBSD.
SIPphone runs Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.3.2 mod_fastcgi/2.2.12 mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.14 OpenSSL/0.9.6b on unknown.

Does anyone have information on other corporate VoIP-PBX solutions?

http://skype.com/skype_p2pexplained.html

Skype is VoIP using a P2P network for optimizing transmissions

Read and parroting the ad copy are we? Here's the thing, though

a) P2P "optimization" techniques are inappropriate to attempt to apply to VoIP (except for perhaps conference calls) - No one else can fill in parts of your source stream, so any "advanced" routing is trying to rebuild IP. I see a lot of nonsense intended for the uninformed on their page (reads like a miracle cure), but it just doesn't sound right. So to conclude, VoIP has a non-shareable stream, and requires close to zero latency...yeah, shares a lot with file sharing software.

b) Oooh, they derive directory lists and online statuses from the Kazaa network. Wow, that had to save at least a couple of hours of development. Brilliant.

c) This leaves the whole gamut of goofy, you know, voice over IP requirements.

See, I see "I haven't read the article" and bells start going off in my head, saying that this person probably has no clue what they're talking about.

Funny, those bells go off in my head fairly consistently, just as it did with your post.

VOXILLA.COM Staff Report

It says a lot about the future of internet telephony that two of the most successful bad boys of the internet - Kazaas Niklas Zenstrom and MP3.coms Michael Robertson - have turned their attention to promoting the growth of Voice over IP.

Both Zenstrom and Robertson incurred the ire of the music industry and the Recording Institute Association of America because the technologies they helped establish made it much easier to download copyrighted music over the net. Robertson came first by helping to make the MP3 compression format the ubiquitous standard for audio on the net. Zenstrom followed by releasing Kazaa, which quickly became the most popular P2P program used by music sharers around the world.

Now the pair are slashing away at a whole different breed of industry titan: the giant telephone companies. But, though they share a common adversary, they have chosen to fight their new battles in entirely different ways.

Zenstrom is hoping to bring the telephone giants to their knees with Skype, an IP-to-IP VoIP software program that currently works only in Microsoft Windows and utilizes a proprietary protocol to establish voice connections between its users. Banking on the popularity of Kazaa, Zenstrom says more than 1.2 million users worldwide have downloaded Skype.

Robertson, on the other hand, has chosen a totally different route. His SIPPhone.com provides users with two telephones for less than $130. The SIPPhones, manufactured by Grandstream, connect to an Ethernet port and utilize the SIP protocol, which is quickly becoming the de facto standard for IP-to-IP voice communications.

Robertson is hoping that SIP becomes as widespread as MP3, and believes SIPPhone will help carry it a large portion of the way there.

In a way, Robertson is trying to do with SIP what he did for MP3 and later with Linux with his still-kicking Lindows operating system: Take a technology that works well but is understood only by the geekiest of computer users, simplify it to its most basic form, and market it to typical consumers directly.

Robertson still does not know how his new company will ever make a profit. His goal is to make it available to millions of users and go from there. Having sold MP3.com to Vivendi for more than $370 million in 2001, he can probably take his time to get there.

We caught up with Robertson during VON 2003 in Boston last month. Heres our conversation:

Voxilla: The SIPPhone has been out for nearly two months. So whos signing up?

Michael Robertson: I would say that probably the number 1 feedback we get is that its from international users. Theyll get two phones, theyll try them out and then theyll email us with Hey, Im ordering two more because I have a friend, or a co-worker, or an office in, fill in the foreign country here, India, China, Mexico. Thats one of the key uses were seeing initially.

V: Do you see international use as the major driving force behind VoIP growth?

MR: Yes. Thats where people pay huge phone rates. They want to avoid those huge phone bills. Thats where the phone bills get the biggest because you have private and government monopolies that own a lot of these companies. So it makes economic sense.

V: SIPPhone has announced an interconnectivity agreement with Packet8. Are you interested in doing the same with others, such as

The same deregulation allows VOIP like Skype simply to take off without any questions being asked (so far).

If the US were to regulate VOIP and tax it or otherwise inhibit its implementation it will just shoot itself in the foot and hobble into the "human communication over IP" era. Europe, Japan and most of the rest of the world will find no fault in VOIP.

It remains to be seen if this is entirely true, former national carriers could try to make a last ditch effort but most of them are in such deep financial trouble that they really are dangerously close to bankrupcy.

I started using Skype last week, the sound quality in my experience blows the Voice IM clients away. They claim to be developing a way of calling regular phones as well.

It is still going to require another registry that has central control. All this does is "one up" the game. What would be better is a global decentralized directory where anyone can broadcast their own name, and it is verified and authenticated by users storing the proper authentication key. This is slightly similair to what Skype has done with their global decentralized user directory.

Any downfalls you can name for this system still doesn't rule out the benefits of it being run IN ADDITION to central controled DNS with problems like Verisign.

When can we drop this telephone/fee system so I can just call someones IP address without a centralized service?

Now.

It's noones business what I run on top of it.

Who is this Noone fellow? Is he an elected official? Or is it like Ulysses's pseudonym "Nemo"? (in that case...)

I can't believe I just read this entire thing and didn't see one link to Skype! Wasn't this just on Slashdot a few days ago? You'd have to get your friends onto the service, but it reeally is very easy, it's encrypted, and the quality is quite good for 56k.