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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
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.
there are also questions about whether this new form of instant access could become as oppressively intrusive as e-mail often seems
As intrusive as email? I consider email to be the least intrusive form of communication. Making a phone in my pocket ring no matter where I am in the world is the most intrusive way to communicate, if you ask me.
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
The biggest boom for this market will NOT be you calling your friends to gossip or talk about cars, it will be to have instant tech support or online help while shopping: you're sitting at your computer, looking at something, and needing help.
There are already online stores (Amazon.com, backcountrystore, etc.) that offer instant chat with a service rep-- it`s a very short hop, skip and a jump from there to being able to dial up at customer service rep. and verbally talk while getting help or confirming an order.
Things will get mean when this process goes the other way: once I buy a CD on Amazon, someone will call me on my VoIP to upsell or cross sell me on related titles...
davejenkins.com |
'Skype, a made-up term that rhymes with "tripe,"
It rhymes with 'hype' much better.
--
But in general (not zealots), the person using the software cares about the functionality and price. If something is free do most people care if it is open source? Have you modified your open source software today?
Fight Spammers!
"Skype works best from a fully connected computer, which runs counter to the whole trend of ever more mobile communication."
What kind of minimum system requirement is that? Could you list that on the side of a box and get away with it?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Consider for a moment how ridiculous that statement sounds to the hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers who live outside the USA - especially in northern European countries where corruption by any measure is far beneath American levels.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
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
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"
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 ...
The ones who wrote a great piece of software and sold it Sharman?
Or
Sharman networks, the assholes who ruined it by stuffing it chock full of spyware?
It looks like the former to me. YOu need to worry about the latter.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.