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PC Magazine's In-Depth VoIP Review
Voipster writes "PC Magazine has completed their in-depth review of six VoIP providers. The Editor's Choice award goes to AT&T's CallVantage service.
Unlike other reviews that consist of making a few phone calls, PC Magazine uses Minacom's PowerProbe 6000 VoIP testing equipment which provides hard numerical scores for a DTMF detection test, a fax transmission test, and two voice quality tests, PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality) and VQES (Voice Quality Evaluation System).
However, after a very detailed analysis of each provider, the calculated scores don't carry much weight as they award AT&T's CallVantage the Editor's Choice and four other services strangely tie for second place."
Here's my review of Skype: no charge to use (for now) for Internet only communication, closed source, but it works very well on UNIX clones (at least on Linux and FreeBSD w/ Linux emulation) as well as Microsoft operating systems.
However, both I and my friends noticed that Skype makes a number of highly suspicious encrypted connections to sites in Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates. If that is not enough to make you shudder you should know that Skype is made by the infamous Swedish-Danish duo Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who are also the makers of Kazaa. That's right, they're the same guys who infested Kazaa with adware and spyware and the same guys who used the DMCA to sue the Kazaa Lite guys for releasing Kazaa Lite, the adwarefree and spywarefree Kazaa client.
People claim that Skype sports no adware, but the fact that those highly suspicious connections to those sites are not even mentioned anywhere on the Skype site makes me believe there is a strategy in place to deploy adware, spyware and to even (ab)use Skype clients to act as unwitting spam proxies when the right time comes. Imagine 20 million users each unknowingly sending out 12 spam emails an hour. Launching a spam campaign with impunity has never been easier. As if that was not enough, the infamous duo based their new venture in Estonia. Why? Because of lax IP and privacy regulations, excellent Internet infrastructure, cheap labor ($300 a month for an experienced programmer) and proximity to Sweden and Denmark. Do you still feel good about using Skype?