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VoIP Beats Conventional Phone Service In Iraq
andyring writes "According to this article at Wired, without reliable long distance or particularly international telephone service in Iraq, citizens in Baghdad and elsewhere turn to voice chat over programs such as Yahoo Voice Chat or other similar programs. Broadband at Internet cafes in Baghdad runs about $1/hr, whereas an international phone call (if you can even get a connection) is about $1/minute. The service is so popular, it sucks up almost all the available bandwidth from the government-run ISP, State Company for Internet Services (site is Arabic)."
If you use MSIE then you don't see it.
Using something like Yahoo Messenger to talk to people instead of using long distance isn't a new phenomenon. I have personally been using Yahoo Messenger and (before) Net2Phone on MSN Messenger to talk to people in England and India. International call rates aren't prohibitively expensive for me but it still makes sense to save a lot of money by using a free service. Voice quality isn't bad at all- most of the times it seems quite natural in a telephone sort of way. It works almost perfeclty if one or both parties have a broadband connection. Also, I have been talking to and have stayed connected to people who I otherwise wouldn't have been in touch with.
A lot of the people I talk to wouldn't be able to afford international telephony or find it very expensive at best. These people have been using tools such as Yahoo Messenger to stay connected for quite some while now.
Posting messages for the betterment of humanity..
IT is the same in all third world countries, but if the surfing got big really before VOIP it usually wont work because there is no bandwidth left for the internet cafés to use. Instead special phone companies that carry longdistance call over ip has sprung up, but that is expensive about a third of a per minute.
[yes, this is a repost from another story. but it's a really really good program]
If you are looking for a nice Open Source VoIP client that works on Windows, Linux, and OS/X, try Speakfreely. For linux/osx track down the Tcl/Tk GUI.
encryption, multiple codecs, NAT, the works.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/
The original author and once-again maintainer is John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD. (!!!)
note: the debian package is criminally out of date and www.speakfreely.org is depreciated, out of date, and morphed into a commercial site.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
See here for details
I agree VoIP is the way. I use Packet8 and could not be happier. $20/m for unlimited LD calling and I can kiss AT&T goodbye.
Hedley