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Skype VoIP Software & Service Reviewed
securitas writes "The Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows reviews Skype VoIP software and the SkypeOut paid Internet telephony service in today's New York Times. Fallows almost raves about the software and service, writing, 'Skype, a made-up term that rhymes with "tripe," is the most popular and sexiest application of VoIP'. But he acknowledges that 'There is one huge drawback: Skype works best from a fully connected computer, which runs counter to the whole trend of ever more mobile communication.' Fallows interviewed Skype's CEO Niklas Zennstrom, who discussed company plans for 'partnerships with manufacturers of cellphones and personal digital assistants,' to address Skype's mobile limitations - it's currently restricted to Pocket PC. Fallows concludes with a provocative thought about Internet telephony when he writes, 'there are also questions about whether this new form of instant access could become as oppressively intrusive as e-mail often seems.' (Mirror at Taipei Times). Slashdot previously covered reviews of VoIP services Vonage, Packet8 and VoicePulse and profiled Skype."
In Internet Calling, Skype Is Living Up to the Hype
By JAMES FALLOWS
HOW big a deal will Skype turn out to be? I have no idea whether the company itself, which was founded one year ago, will someday come to epitomize and dominate a particular booming business, the way Google, eBay and Amazon now do. But I feel confident that the service it provides will be attractive to most people who give it a serious look.
Skype, a made-up term that rhymes with "tripe," is the most popular and sexiest application of VoIP, which doesn't rhyme with anything. VoIP - sometimes pronounced letter by letter, like C.I.A., and at other times as a word - stands for voice over Internet protocol. Essentially, it is a way of allowing a computer with a broadband connection to serve as a telephone.
This new form of conveying voice messages has so many advantages over traditional systems that the whole telecommunications industry is scrambling to see how fast it can shift traffic onto the Internet. AT&T, for example, is no longer recruiting new home customers, but it is offering many new VoIP services. Dozens of other companies - new ones like Vonage and established ones like Verizon - are selling VoIP services, too.
Skype's distinction is that, for now at least, it is the easiest, fastest and cheapest way for individual customers to begin using VoIP. It works this way:
First, you download free software from skype.com. Skype runs on most major operating systems, including Windows XP and 2000, Linux, Pocket PC for portable devices and, as of this summer, Mac OS. On three of the computers on which I installed it, it ran with no tweaking at all. On the fourth, I had to change one setting for the sound card, following easy instructions on the site.
While running, Skype sits in a little window, like an instant-messenger program, and lets you to talk with other users in two ways. If the other person has Skype installed, you can talk as long as you want, free, and with sound quality that is startlingly better than that of a normal phone connection. Over the years, I have learned to say "that's 'F' as in Frank" when spelling my last name on the phone, because normal phone lines don't carry the frequencies that distinguish "F" from "S." Listening to a conversation on Skype, by contrast, is like listening to a radio program over streaming audio. The sound comes from speakers that are built into most laptop computers or attached to most desktops.
You'll need a microphone. Most laptops come with nearly invisible but quite effective tiny microphones embedded near the keyboard. (It may look odd to be talking to your laptop while using Skype, but in the cellphone age, we've all seen worse.) At either a desktop or a laptop computer, you can use a separate microphone or, less awkwardly, a phone handset or headset that plugs into a computer port. Skype sells headsets for $15 and up. I got the cheapest model, which works fine.
You can also reach people who don't use Skype, through a new service called SkypeOut. This allows you to dial nearly any cellular or land-line telephone number in any country and talk. Though it isn't free, it's really cheap. Skype's prices are in euros - its founders are Scandinavian, the main programmers are Estonian and its headquarters are in Luxembourg - and they average two or three American cents a minute, at any time of day. With a credit card, you buy calling time in units of 10 euros ($12.18), which are deducted automatically as you talk.
I started with 10 euros. After my wife talked to her sister in Italy for a half-hour and I made one quick call to the Philippines and five more within the United States, we still had 9.10 euros left.
Another time, I spoke from Washington simultaneously with my transvestite son in San Francisco and his partner who was visiting Bangalore, India. (Up to five parties can participate in a Skype conference call.) All of us were at computers running Skype, so the conversation was free. The sound quality was sharp; it was ab
I wouldn't call BitTorrent mild.. considering it's often running 20 threads at once.
I hate registering
So use Bugmenot. If you are really clever you can use Firefox and use the bugmenot extension. hOORay!
No need to waste a mod point on something that does not deserve it.
As someone noted before in this thread, Skype is just one form of VoIP, and it doesn't even follow open standard, instead it implements its own format. Stanaphone OTOH uses SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), not only allows outcalls to POTS/mobile, but it also assigns a phone number to each user, so users can actually receive phone calls as well. It works with Windows, Pocket PC and includes voice mail and call forwarding. And it can be used with SIP phones, which can be plugged directly to a LAN and be ready to use in seconds - no PC needed.
Of course there's Vonage , which can also be used from a Pocket PC (just install SJPhone and configure your account), and place/receive calls from POTS/mobile. The problem is that Vonage is only available to US customers, while Stanaphone is available to anyone anywhere.
They made a version for "Linux on x86". A "Linux version" would require source, which they don't provide.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
From an email I just sent to somebody. I could be wrong about the NAT issue, I looked into it about 3 or 4 months ago.
NAT screws up point to point protocols, in particular when both participating end-points are behind NAT boxes. Skype gets around that by bouncing the phone call off of a third "peer" that has a public IP address.
There are a number of drawbacks with this "solution" to NAT problems
(a) your phone call, between NATted peers A and B, relies on a third party C with a public IP address. If C fails, the phone call fails, even though peers A and B still have connectivity, and there may (still) be a direct network path between peers A and B.
(b) C bears a cost of carrying this phone call, yet never receives any benefits. Traffic goes from A to C to B and from B to C to A. C ends up paying (in either $ terms, or reduced bandwidth availablity), yet C isn't part of the converstation. A and B, due to being behind NAT, can never recipricate the role they were provided with by C. In fact, it might appear that A, B and C are peers, but A and B are not. _peer_ means an equal. A and B are not equals when it comes to the value they contribute to the network, so they aren't peers of C. Wind the clock forward a few years, and if NAT deployment continues, these "peer to peer" networks will have more and more "As and Bs", and less and less "Cs". The Cs will continue to have to bare an increased costs without receiving any benefits. That is a disincentive for the Cs to continue to exist. Cs will turn NAT on so they don't suffer any more. Eventually there won't be any Cs. IOW, NAT is going to eventually destroy the Skype "peer to peer" VoIP network... or maybe Skype is relying on that, and eventually will provide a paid "Cs" service. Hmm, that's a nice conspiracy theory.
(c) Even if Skype implements encryption protocols, unless adequate measures are taken (eg, trading _independently verified_ public keys), man-in-the-middle type attacks are possible. Of course, that is possible on the Internet anyway, even with a true "peer to peer" or two party protocol. However, it does require access to the "infrastructure" of the Internet, eg routers, firewals etc, and this access is relatively rare. Bare in mind that both public / private key protocols like RSA, and other key exchange protocols, like Diffie-Hellman, are naturally vulnerable to MITM attacks, which is why the parties have to be independantly verified, outside of the key exchange protocols themselves.
The Skype "anti-NAT" solution actually architects in a "man-in-the-middle" ie. C in the example above. If people don't independantly and properly verify _public keys_, and they usually won't, because it is complicated, and hard to understand what value it adds (which are typical of most security eg, most people don't pick good passwords), all the "Cs" are in ideal positions to listen in on phone calls. Just wait till a proof of concept is announced on Bugtraq, and then see how many script kiddies start disabling NAT so they can listen in on Skype phone calls.
(d) And then there is the whole "proprietory product / customer lock-in problem". Why else would Skype create their own proprietory VoIP solution, when perfectly good ones existed that were open standards, developed via the IETF ?
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Somebody here mentioned that this idea would be useful on the internet, for example in online shopping. This is already done. In my trip planning I ran into problems when I was trying to purchase airline tickes within the US. I was trying to buy from Continental and they have a VoIP help desk that you can call directly from their web page. It's not Skype, it's Windows only :-( but it worked like a charm (on Windows of course).
The other pointers I have consern the Skype application itself. In the article it says:
I don't quite get that. First of all, the Skype website posts the following hardware requirements: 400 MHz CPU 33.6 Kbps modem (It also requires a computer running Windows which is odd since you can download both a Linux and a Mac OS version in addition to their Windows version) Secondly, these hardware requirements are not bogus! Me and my friend tried to use Skype and manually reduced the network speed. We managed to get a quite decent conversation on a 22Kbps connection so a 28.8 Kbps modem should even work (these old modems never quite get the speed they have on the label but getting a 22Kbps from a 28.8 modem isn't too far fetched I think).The last two points I have are a bit on the downside. /.ers should know ports 80 and 443 are the HTTP and HTTPS ports. This is just not playing nice! One of the rules I was tought when getting my B.Sc. in computer science was that you do not use reserved ports for anything else than the protocols that they're reserved for! Granted, they do provide the option of turning this off but still.
First, I have a gripe with the way contact lists are stored. They're stored locally. This is the same "mistake" ICQ made. It sucks to have to redo your contact lists if you set up Skype on two different computers.
Lastly, in the settings panel in Skype the user can check the option "Use ports 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections". As most
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
the principle of skype's [pieyer-teuuuw-pieeeyer] connectivity is this:
1) make a random outgoing connection to 50 or more other machines (not behind firewalls)
2) route incoming traffic BACK down one of those random connections
3) during a call, check whether one of the other random connections has better connectivity, and if so, switch to it.
this is the sort of functionality that needs to be available in open source VPN software.
reason: SIP is pathetic in comparison to Skype.
98% of users don't give a flying fuck about NAT and firewalls (or updates. or anti-virus software. or anti-spam software).
also it's literally impossible for telecoms to cut Skype's VoIP traffic out of the internet to disrupt them from taking money from AT&T, France Telecom, BT etc. by contrast, blocking the SIP port "oops it's so hard to keep good VoIP software running these days"
i've been an avid user of iChat AV's audio chat feature on both broadband and 56k connections since late december '03. recently, skype for osx came out and i've had the chance to try mac/mac and mac/pc (and other combinations) on both 56k and broadband. also, these are transpacific (mexico/aus) conversations, so ymmv
my opinion is that on broadband, both are of comparable quality, though ichat produces a richer sound, while skype manages to reproduce the mic with more fidelity which feels harsher and somewhat higher pitched. i prefer ichat's reproduction, but it's all personal taste.
on 56k, ichat will simply cut out when the connections drops below 4kb/s or so. skype seems to scale the quality which causes a bit of confusion and is annoying. i prefer the silence over distortion and abstractions, so again ichat wins for me.
skype does have a few major advantages though. it's cross platform (AIM/iChat seems to have problems with everyone i've tried to call) and already has conferencing features built in (though it's unusuable at 56k). i'll have to wait for Tiger to come out to see how the conference feature compares, and if iChat's architecture is better to narrowband users than skype's. oh, and skypeout, but haven't tried it yet.
the very pleasent surprise was the skype is an attractive and easy to use program and feels at home on osx. definately worth the hype, but i'm sticking to ichat.