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Skype Offering SkypeOut Service for Free
Skudd writes "In an effort to boost new customer acquisition, Skype has begun offering its 'SkypeOut' service for free. The free service is slated to last until December 31, 2006." From the article: "While the SkypeOut service will allow free calling to regular phones, the company will continue to charge people to get calls using a service it calls SkypeIn, which costs about $38 for an unlimited 12-month subscription. Consumers can get the service for three months for about $12.80."
Note to submitters/editors: Not everyone lives in US/Canada.
Check this site out for other gripes concerning rogers.
Telecom service companies need to go down. Communication companies should be charging what the service is WORTH.
http://www.ihaterogers.ca/
One of Skype's biggest perks is cheap international calling. Submitter sucks, should have put that in the summary. It's in the fucking article's title, fps.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
No - I tried it today and it Just Works(TM).
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
Just tried calling my cell phone on it from my old Powerbook G4 Ti @ 500 Mhz with OS X Tiger. Works -excellently-. No activation or anything needed to my account. Downloaded latest version, ran it, and it worked right "out of the box".
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
December 31, 2006. After that, They are unsure of what they are going to do. I remember a company called dialpad years ago that did something similar, except in reverse, they started out giving unlimited free calling to anyone. Then they cut it down to 10 minutes, 5 minutes, then 1 minute and then they were forced to shut down because no one would subscribe. I'm sure this isn't the case with Skype but given they're past record I'm not sure this is a good idea.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
no. I didn't have to.
I tested it by creating a new UID. The first two times I tried calling a friend's mobile phone, I got error messages. The third time and every time after was smooth sailing. The sound isn't the best, not cell phone quality, but it works. The number showed up as "000123456" on the recipient's phone, so its usefulness is limited; those who screen calls would likely not pick up, and since you can't get incoming on it without upgrading - well.
If you have an outgoing number, I'm sure you can solve this issue by being issued an incoming number. IMO, it seems to be a loss leader of sorts, to get folks to upgrade to paid service.
un burrito me trampeó.
For my UK incoming number I use www.sipgate.com
For my US incoming number I use www.sipphone.com
For outgoing calls I use www.voipbuster.com (they also offer an incoming number but I already had one)
www.voipcheap.com or www.voipcheap.co.uk (same stuff really).
I have a Sipura ATA so I do not even need to have my computer turned on to make or recieve calls. You can get other ATAs and I do not think the Sipura is the best but I bought it 3 years ago when it was.
BTW I live in northern Thailand and with this I can call and chat to my friends as much as I like.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
By U.S. law, even a disconnected phone line is able to dial 911.
"Joy is contagious," he said, peering into the microscope.
As a poor student who moves to a new town every four months because of the program i'm in at uni (yay co-op), i GREATLY appreciate Skype making my calls free.
1) Because i move all the time, i don't maintain a landline;
1) All of my family and friends are out of town;
2) cell phones in Canada haven't been deregulated yet and Rogers, Bell, Telus, etc., charge through the nose and other unpleasant orifices.
Skype is making my life a HECK of a lot easier. I've tried it already... a lot... and it works wonderfully.
It should be no surprise that different VOIP providers offer different levels of support, service and infrastructure.
I don't know about rogers per se, but if Roger's voip is anything like what its counterpart Shaw is offering, it deserves to be more expensive, its run on a dedicated network, separate from their broadband internet service -- meaning it doesn't rely on your internet being up!
This dedicated network is also independantly powered and with backup, right down to including a battery backup for your voip modem, meaning you can even make or receive a call during a power outage! Its really almost at the same level as POTS, and light years beyond what other voip providers can even theoretically provide in terms of infrastructure and reliability.
Of course you *do* pay a premium for it but it really is competing with POTS from the local telecom on a completely separate level from what you'd see from a Skype or Vonage. Its not for everyone, some of us don't need that level of infrastructure, fault tolerance, or reliability. Some of us do.
Just to note, there are a few security concerns about Skype, its ownership by eBay, and potential security holes within the Skype network. Be aware of what you're using when you're using it.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
http://www.voipbuster.com/ ...
;-)
;-)
http://www.sipdiscount.com/
http://www.voipcheap.com/
voipdiscount.com
voipstunt.com
gives... well... around 40 countries free! (well... you pay 10euros for 2 or 3 months and you can call a lot of countries for 0 cent/min or 1 cent/min)
I use it a lot (with sjphone) and for this price... this is unbeatable! But for a good VOIP, you need a good High Speed Internet Access! A delay of 1 or 2 seconds and cause a hang up before you can even try to say "hello"
sip compatible with any hardware SIP or softphone like sjPhone (mac, pc, linux, pda...)
sip server: sip.voipbuster.com (port 5060)
domain: voipbuster.com
stun server: stun.voipbuster.com
sip server: sip1.sipdiscount.com (port 5060)
domain: sipdiscount.com
stun server: stun.sipdiscount.com
etc
Good phone cards to Asia that beat Skype are hard to find. And Skype is way easier.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
I've been using Skype for a couple of months with a mic/headset combo and it has been surprisingly good. One of the benefits of Skype is that you can make conference calls. This is something I've never done at home with a landline. I had $9 Skype-Out left and don't know how I'm gonna use it up now(-:
I've never tried it, but I know some people who have attempted to use fax machines on other VoIP systems with mixed results. I believe the problem stems from the psychoacoustic compression (e.g.: G.729) that's used to reduce the bandwidth requirements of calls: it's very low bitrate and designed for speech only, and doesn't have anywhere near the data-carrying capacity of a standard POTS line.
I think some VoIP systems (Vonage) are smart enough to increase the bandwidth so as to not block fax and data calls completely, but how well it works I don't know. I'm not sure what codec Skype uses (and I suspect nobody outside of Skype does, either), but judging from the audio quality I think it's compressing pretty hard. And if the artifacts are that audible in speech, I can't help but think that a data transmission is probably going to do poorly. YMMV based on network conditions, though.
For outgoing faxes, especially if you only send them occasionally, it might be worthwhile to give it a shot. The cost savings might be worth having to try it a few times to get it to go through, or for it to transmit very slowly. If you receive a lot of faxes though it might be a bad idea, since you can't ever be sure how many times the person on the far end will retransmit if the call fails the first time. Having a fax machine that only works some of the time, to me, is worse than not having one at all since you wouldn't be able to trust it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Hmm... during the big blackout in August 2003, my cellphone had no trouble connecting to a tower (which was handy, since I was able to browse news sites to find out that the power wasn't just out locally, and would be out for a while). I imagine enough towers have emergency generators to keep the network up.
I just installed it and completed an hour long phone call to a landline. I used the cheap out-of-the-box microphone that came with my Dell, and my computer speakers (not headphones), just like a speakerphone.
Worked beautifully. Neither I nor my friend had any problem hearing, and it didn't sound like a speaker phone all -- none of those typical speakerphone "click on/click off" noises at all. We could even both tallk at the same time, with both of us more-or-less audible. It was just about as if my friend was in the same room as me. (Some of the credit is probably due to my soundcard.)
I did have a major CPU utilization problem with Skype until I uninstalled McAfee's firewall, which made the audio terrible. McAfee had long been disabled in favor of (the free, better, not reliant on IE and Active-X) Kerio, but I hadn't gotten around to removing it entirely. Once removed, no problem with Skype at all.
Also, as I have Windows XP SP2, it was necessary to install this TCPIP.sys patch to get around Microsoft's "helpfulness".
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I was able to test the free SkypeOut by calling my home phone from my PowerBook, but not without some difficulty. At first it wouldn't dial the number at all -- apparently you need to use a bit of a special incantation to get it to dial.
On my first attempt, I tried to do a ten digit dial (xxx-xxx-xxxx), but it wouldn't let me dial out. So I next tried adding a 1 in front of the number (1-xxx-xxx-xxxx), but again, no-go.
The trick? You must put a plus sign ('+') in front of the 1 (that is, dial "+1-xxx-xxx-xxxx"). Then it works just fine. But otherwise, it doesn't work at all -- the call button will be completely disabled.
I wonder however if this won't be ripe for abuse. All Skype calls show up as being from 000-012-3456, and I just know there are some asshats out there who are going to start using this for obscene phone calls, or other negative abuses of the system.
Anyhow, if you can't get your version of Skype to work, try it with the + symbol in front of the 1. On the latest Mac version at least, this is the only way it will work correctly.
Yaz.
Make a non-US/Canada call once every 6 months and you'll be fine.
I've got a 7x. IP as well and I can't even use the service as I don't have any skype credit, it just keeps asking me to buy it. Even if I do the +1 thing and using either 2.0 or 2.5 clients.
It seems a lot of people with IPs starting in 7 get the exact same problem. Skype should really fix this, it's a pretty large netblock.
That system is not called ENID , but ENUM.
"In short, a server with ENUM support will lookup a dialled telephone number in DNS to see if there's alternate ways to set up the call instead of just calling out on the PSTN telephone line. ENUM may contain a reference to a SIP URL, a telephone number to dial, a web page or an e-mail address. "
if they had held out for a year or two longer ... well, they would have been Skype.
Skype's strength is its ability to scale. Dialpad wasn't using p2p the way Skype is, and that is the difference. It is a minimal increase in cost per user to grow Skype, but the profit is there. This doesn't apply to SkypeOut, but since they are charging for that they can cover costs (this promotion aside).
The current promotion in North America is just to raise adoption, and as Skype said themselves, the cost is low enough to make it feasible. Skype needs to grow in this market to reach the success that is expected of them, and this is a way to speed up the growth.
Suggestion: Get a headset.
If you're using your computer speakers, it's more than likely that the person at the other end is hearing their own voice too, fed back into your microphone, and delayed by half a second or so.
Hearing yourself is really annoying.
That is odd. My ip starts with 71, for the first octet and I have the same problem. I thought maybe Linux only had the problem, then I tested it. So I guess I'll have to war drive to get a "good" Skype ip? THIS SUCKS!!!
Problem is that technically VOIP is NOT a phone service.
Phone in most (all?) countries are goverened by a strict set of regulations regarding billing, level of service etc. etc.
VOIP on the other hand is a novelty application for the internet and
is not geverned by any regulations and cannot paricipate in many regulated
telephone services. The problem with 911,999,912,914 type services is
that the service provider is supposed to supply subscriber details and
location details to the emergency operator. "133t5ax0r" at rackspace
is not quite detailed enough.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Tell BellSloth that. I haven't had a landline in years and yet none of the BellSloth-serviced locations I've lived in has had a dialtone or 911 access.
I couldn't get free calls either (all the ip's I get from Verizon start w/ 7), but when I downloaded the beta it worked just fine.