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)."

Comments

obligatory SpeakFreely plug

[nadaou]

[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note: the debian package is criminally out of date and www.speakfreely.org is depreciated, out of date, and morphed into a commercial site.