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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."
Well, a friend and I decided that since Doom 3 doesn't have coop, we'd effectively create our own using VoIP. Quite surprisingly, this was more fun than I could have imagined. Talking to a friend vocally whilst navigating the same dark corners and running into the same ugly creatures creates a better coop experience than you might think. Voice quality was very good, even when being played on the same channel/s as the Doom 3 audio. The only problem we ran into was stuttering of the vocal channel in Skype as a result of my friend using BitTorrent in the background (any sort of mild uploading seems to cause issues with Skype).
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
I love the pay-as-you-go type of billing. Since Skype's main revenue generator is this Skype Out service, I wonder if they would object to seeing integration into instant messaging clients such as gaim? It would probably only help in getting more customers onboard.
Microsoft, or AOL, or someone with some bank could probably put Skype out on their ass by copying their business model and integrating similar services into their own already popular instant messaging clients. (Though I hope they don't)
"But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
Skype is closed source software with a very promiscuous communication profile. There is a standard for VoIP applications, which facilitates gateways to other phone systems, but Skype doesn't use it. Apparently users don't care.
It means fully connected as ability to acsess the internet is a fast fashion. With pocket pc you would have to be going from hotspot to hotspot
Call me and my voicemail! 914-713-6795. (wow, I have the balls to post my voip number on
It Just Works. Linux, PCs, Mac. Qt 3.3 limitation, tho.
I'm guessing "SkypeIn" will be available before long, allowing POTS to call a number assigned to you, representing your PC, and if you are not online do the "answering machine thing". Maybe $7.99 a month?
They also have an "Echo Test Service" user that you can fool with while testing the stuff, and lots of help forums.
Also instant messaging...
For all the people against closed source, all I can say is "the gaim people will be licking their chops" to get to sniffin'.
There seems to be a lot of anger toward Skype, but even tho it is closed source, most open source projects could learn a lot from how they did their project. I say this because I tried using three VOIP libraries/clients over the last few months and none of them worked. Out of date howtos, difficult to find help without endless we searches to dead links--you know the routine.
Here is the place I usually get blasted and whiners say "what do you expect for free, skype had all that kazaa money, so they can do better, you shouldn't complain about free software it's wrong, etc". Yeah, well, if I'm not allowed to use free speech to complain about FSF/GNU software (because it's free?!?!) well screw it I like Skype.
Skype just works.
A friend and I were talking about VOIP the other day(he used to be a telecom network engineer) and I realized that not only will this be "the next big thing" for the internet and broadband, but this will(might) have a significant effect on regular phone service. Prices will probably go down, as will cellphone service prices, as someone with a laptop and a Wi-fi connection could just as easily make a call for half the price. Just my $0.02
I have been using skype ans more importantly skypeout (internet to telephone) and I have to say I love it. The only drawback is the CPU required I think they are using some powerful compression. As regards the bandwidth it is not much , my father uses it on a 56K dial up without problems.
For me the best part is the savings. From my phone to call family in the Czech Republic , I used ot pay 35-45 "euro" cents ($0.4-$0.5) , I live in a country without cheap telecoms carriers. For me this is a blessing now I pay 2.7 cents per min.
I really must congratulate them . Many people I know use their service for long distance calls..also for the financial side.
I just started using Skype to talk to my girlfriend in Canada (Im in the UK), and I have to say that everything is painlessly easy to use. Installed and setup an account at either end within 5 minutes of the software download, no firewall reconfiguration, and call success first time. It Just Worked (tm).
:) Try it, thats all I can recommend.
Yes, having the thing attached to the PC all the time is a downside, but you cant have everything. For me it saves huge phonebills, so Im willing to put up with having to sit at my PC while im using it (like I wouldnt anyway, I have a webcam
I've been using Skype heavily the last few months. Despite being closed source (and thus attracting the ire of the Slashdot community in much the same way as bikies don't like bikes that aren't black) and not conforming to a standard (who is to say the VOIP standard is any better than Skype's methods?), the thing works brilliantly.
End users don't give a stuff if it conforms to a standard. Just look at how many ignorant users log into AOL IM every single day! They care about features. Reliability. Simplicity. Cool icons. Pretty colours. RFC compliance does not factor into their decision. The sooner developers in general realise and accept this, the better life will become.
I use Skype for gaming. It runs in the background, does not interfere with my entertainment, and almost never causes any problems at all.
I use Skype for staying in touch with my home while travelling. It's a cheap alternative to expensive international phone rates in hotels. Again, it has yet to fail me.
I don't use Skype for calling land lines, but that will change pretty soon. They admitted to overload-related problems recently, so I'm waiting for these to die down.
Some observations from using their free service include... nice low latency even during international calls. Possibly lower latency than calls placed from a land-line. Reliability makes me smile - find user in contact list, highlight user, click CALL and it rings. They answer, we talk, no bugs, no glitches. Not requiring an expensive handset (ala Cisco VOIP) also makes me smile. Lots.
Show me an equivalent solution with all these good points that adheres to some magical standard and I might show an interest. But only if it look purty.
Caveat Emptor.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If it looks to good to be true, then it probably is.
How about serverless peer-to-peer?
Ok, what do I know?
I know I'd follow CERN's advice.
Stuff that matters.
Ok,
So I bought into VoIP about a year ago. I bought a small Analog to VoIP converter to hook up an old phone I had and get a new line.
At first I tried out Free World Dialup. Worked but had limited use as it didn't have so many users. Plus I couldn't imagine explaining to my parents and technophobe friends how to configure their firewall (gasps) and get to configure even Jphone or the like. Too many paramaters!!
I subscribed here in the UK to a VoIP service (Pipemedia). To put it simple. It sucks. Low success rate of incoming and outgoing calls.
Now caller Id on incoming calls etc.
One of the benefits , or so I thought, or VoIP was the ability to take the line theoritically everywhere I went (like at my Parents Place while on Holiday as they live in the carribbean and I wanted my British number ot follow me). Well it's a no go. Setting the damn thing up was a hassle.
THe only thing I got from the whole VoIP experience was as much time setting up the system, checking the configuration when the VoIP was unreliable etc..)
Then came skype. Skype works virtually from anywhere. It's a no brainer and it just works.
That's something you can't top.
Most of all I could even get my parents to install it painlessly.
The only think I am waiting for now is a Handytone-like adapter that will be plugged directly in an ethernet jack and allow my traditional phone to the Skype network with no computer assistance.
I know they have a USB adapter in the works with Siemens but I can't really see the point if it still requires a computer.
I think that very seriously they will then achieve the perfect equation:
ultra simple service + security + free + hardware that just works (like the software) = profit fromthe value added services (skype out/in, voice mail etc.)
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
I have learned through bitter experience not to respond immediately to e-mail, even if it would be convenient for me to do so. If people learn that you generally respond within a few minutes, they start to get expectations that you will be contactable all the time and all they need to do is write an e-mail to get a reply straight away. This causes major communication problems when you then decide to go away for a couple of days, or if your net connection goes down, or if you just want to be left alone for a couple of hours.
Nowadays I let e-mail 'mature' in my inbox, much like the PHB in Dilbert does with files on his desk. Once I think it's ripe, and the sender will most likely be away from their computer, I write back. That way they get a reasonably prompt response, but they don't get an unrealistic expectation that I will be at their beck and call.
The same applies to mobile phones, both text messaging and voice calls - I make a habit of routinely turning off my mobile, even if I just want to watch some TV or do some work in my home office. People have learned that I will eventually call them back if it is something of sufficient importance. They have also learned that they cannot assume that I will answer my phone 24-7, and as a result I think the quantity of calls has decreased but the quality has increased.
Of course I'm mainly talking about clients here - I run a small business.
Read Pynchon.
I have doubts about Skype security.c urity/2004- June/003910.html
First of all it's made by the kaaza bums.
Here are a few links that makes mewonder about the whole callto protocol:
http://lists.seifried.org/pipermail/se
Although Skype calls are encrypted end-to-end using 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption, which is nearly impossible to hack, I still have my doubts, because piggybacking spyware from a supernode mode of operation would be relatively easy. In that cse, the encryption would protect the source and not the victim.
A skype spokesman denied that there was an overhead problem with peer-to-peer telephony (as there had been with KaZaa) as the technology only used about 3-16Kbit/s on average, although he added that factors such as bandwidth available for the other party, network conditions and CPU performance would also play a part. The spokesman said that the use of Skype would not compromise an enterprise's security as the system was fully secure.However, IMO,if you are on a fat pipe,I have doubts(again) about the security of the supernode in general, particularly if it is not internally configurable from the internals of the aplication itself, in this case, the Skype interface.
To sum it up: because of the relatively high encryption, the security issues that skype poses are not related to data interception. Yet I can see ways that extra and unwanted data transmission can be initiated.
If a product is closed source and proprietary, then that should be all you need to know about it.
..... d'oh!)
The company for which I work already uses VoIP, but we wouldn't touch Skype with a barge pole. It's our policy that we avoid closed-source software as far as possible, even if that means having to do stuff by hand. We use asterisk for an exchange, together with Zultys hardware IP phones, using SIP. We just have an ISDN-30 line (E1) connected with the appropriate hardware interface card (by Digium) to the asterisk server. The card is multi-span, just in case 30 lines turns out not to be enough. The server is a dual Xeon 2.8, which might be slightly overkill for Asterisk; but it's also running our office software (we pretty much were using LAMP applications before the name was coined) and the E1 card needed a 3V3 PCI slot which is only found on expensive mobos. (There is now a 5V version available
We paid money for the hardware, and we paid in blood, sweat and tears for the software; but nobody can ever take away what we learned.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Although I must agree that Skype is one of the best applications for PC-based VoIP communications currently, I felt really disappointed the last time I tried to use it in my home PC and it wouldn't load due to SoftIce (http://www.compuware.com/products/driverstudio/so ftice.htm) being installed on the same PC. The weirdest fact is that SoftIce wasn't even really running (perhaps it searches my filesystem for that). This paranoia makes no sense to me. I wonder what Skype have to hide inside ...