Prepare to slash your phone bills with Skype
Your home or small business is cordially invited to the same party where big corporates have been whooping it up for a few years. You can drastically reduce telephone bills courtesy of a long promised internet technology called VOIP. You can call it “voyp” if you want; some call it Internet Telephony. I call it money that stays in MY pocket.
Broadband required
All you need to cash in on the savings is to have an “always on” broadband Internet connection, a PC with a microphone and a speaker (just about all of them nowadays) and a free bit of application software from a VOIP provider.
VOIP isn’t really “free” because you do have to pay for your broadband subscription and the land line telephone line that it is connected to (usually) but once those costs are factored in, you can conduct free or very cheap telephone calls almost anywhere in the world. The quality is usually very good but sometimes isn’t as good as a regular telephone.
I was able to make free telephone calls from a sidewalk café in Barcelona recently – using my notebook’s Wi-Fi to connect to a local network (free). Lots of hotels, coffee shops and burger bars are sprouting Wi-Fi hotspots these days. Increasingly I think of them as my personal discount phone boxes. My cell phone bill is way down, too!
The leading personal provider of VOIP service at the moment is Skype. It is a small start up by the same team that created the KaZaA file (usually MP3 music) sharing network. You can visit its website at www.skype.com to read all the hype (which rhymes with the company name) and the conditions of use. The software download is free.
Facts vs Sk(hype)
The application is full featured and easy to use. I didn’t even need to look at the help files in order to make my first call. You can maintain (and import) your list of telephone contacts, dial numbers on a touch tone pad, and keep track of calls you make and the time/money spent (important for business users and parents keeping tabs on teen chatterboxes).
There are 80 million Skype downloaders so far. As I write this, about 2.1 million of them are currently online. If I have a friend or business associate online, I can hit the connect button and be talking to them in seconds without hiking my telephone bill a cent. This is perfect for far flung relations and travelling friends – and a sure way to beat the usurious telephone charges at business hotels (assuming that they have broadband in the rooms).
Skype out
However, you can also use Skype to reach out to the billions of telephones sitting on desks and drawing room tables by purchasing SkypeOut credits. They work like a pre-paid mobile phone credits only they go much further! You can dial any land line phone 20 mainstream countries for 1.7 Euro cents a minute. A call to Liverpool and a call to Buenos Aires cost the same… just about nada (as they say in Argentina).
You can also dial any other land line or mobile phone in the world but it costs more and depends on where that phone is. For example, Afghanistan costs .28 Euro per minute and Zimbabwe mobiles cost 0.116 per minute. Sao Tome and Principe (.97 euro per minute) and other fly specks on the world map cost, not surprisingly, more.
There’s a lot more to Skype, too. You can get a (beta) land line telephone number in several cities of the world complete with voice mail for a very modest charge so that land line users can call YOU on your PC no matter where you are in the world (SkypeIn and Voicemail). You can also use Skype to transfer files and have instant messaging chats.
Teleo arrives
Skype won’t have the world to itself for long. A new US company called Teleo (www.teleo.com) is warming up its Internet servers and competition can only help make a good bargain better. Isn’t it time that broadband connection started saving you money?
Getting hooked up to the Skype pipe
Pros:
Free or very cheap telephone calls
Easy to use software (that’s free, too)
Cons:
Must have a broadband Internet connection
A headset is really required for good fidelity
Sound quality is not always as good as a “real” telephone
Verdict: 5 stars
Skype will dramatically reduce the size of your phone bill.
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