Skype seems to have taken VoIP a little further ahead by introducing a better compression and using a peer-to-peer network to distribute the voice packets. How they actually do it is still a well guarded secret currently. But it work behind firewalls (provided the firewall is open to HTTP or a proxy that support port 80). What amazes me is that within a good sizeable dsl line (768 down, 128 up) it can support 4 way conference quite well. I did a bandwidth measurement (using NetMeter) it only uses approx 4k to transfer both ways and the quality is like using your cellphone.
I also used skypeout paid EURO20 just to try out. Quality is not bad to areas that have very good network infrastructure like the US, Asia, but got a bad quality in Russia. Possibly not enough users on the peer to peer network. The other thing I found is that the quality depends on the number of users on the network (obviously for a peer-to-peer network). In a normal day I have over 800k users and that allow pretty decent voice quality. However at 400k users, quality is bad sometimes can't even get connected. But the skype network is growing and like BitTorrent, the more popular it gets, the better it becomes...
I am sure there are more people who has used Skype here at/.
-m-
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Skype seems to have taken VoIP a little further ahead by introducing a better compression and using a peer-to-peer network to distribute the voice packets. How they actually do it is still a well guarded secret currently. But it work behind firewalls (provided the firewall is open to HTTP or a proxy that support port 80). What amazes me is that within a good sizeable dsl line (768 down, 128 up) it can support 4 way conference quite well. I did a bandwidth measurement (using NetMeter) it only uses approx 4k to transfer both ways and the quality is like using your cellphone. I also used skypeout paid EURO20 just to try out. Quality is not bad to areas that have very good network infrastructure like the US, Asia, but got a bad quality in Russia. Possibly not enough users on the peer to peer network. The other thing I found is that the quality depends on the number of users on the network (obviously for a peer-to-peer network). In a normal day I have over 800k users and that allow pretty decent voice quality. However at 400k users, quality is bad sometimes can't even get connected. But the skype network is growing and like BitTorrent, the more popular it gets, the better it becomes... I am sure there are more people who has used Skype here at /.
-m-