My apologies for an off-topic posting, but I'm considering getting rid of our landline. However, our current cell service doesn't pick up very well in the house, and I was wondering about getting a Skype phone for making calls at home. Do any of you guys have experience using Skype? How is the call quality when you call out to regular phones? And has anyone used a wi-fi phone instead of a computer for Skype?
Better than Skype?
On Marketplace on NPR on thursday I heard a story about Google Voice. It's supposed to be coming out very soon and that it's going to be better than Skype or anything else currently available. They indicated that all calls in the U.S. would be free and international calls would be cheap.
Here's the link for the Marketplace story so that you can hear or read the story first hand and judge for yourself.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/03/12/pm_google_voice/
And here's a link to Google Voice It's only available to certain people right now. Listen to the Marketplace story first to find out why.
https://www.google.com/voice/about
I have received a call from someone using Skype in Costa Rica. They sounded just fine.
Adamsdad "If not you, Who? If not now, When?"
skype user
We have been using skype for personal and business for about 2 years. This includes chat, audio, and video. It has works just fine. We do video chats with the grand parents so they can interact with Piper on our laptop using wifi and it works just groovy. I have had some trouble using with video quality on Vista, but skype did release a new version and it may have fixed but I have not tested since we only use vid on the laptops on XP. There are a bunch of 3rd party application addon which are great from the goofy to business uses.
Gmail did release newer video on thursday to existing or beta users which I am one but I have not had a chance to check out any new features. From what I read it will be released to new user soon. It could be great and the integration into the entire google suite of products could be very handy.
Hope that helps,
Prost,
Robbo
potential skype issues
Our Leader! Cliff mate, how are you, long time...
So, Skype; I've been a user for a while and also considered the switch. here are my thoughts, for what they're worth.
Your main concern will be not being able to make emergency calls on VOIP (voice over internet protocol) - Vonage fails in this regard also. Additionally you'll be at the whims of bandwidth which embs and flows natural according to the demand in your area impacting video and call quality. As for Google's hook-up with GrandCentral, I too am a Beta user and frankly, whilst I thought the idea was interesting I just never got comfortable with making the jump. Our landline costs us $30 a month (we stripped all the features down to bare bones) and we use PennyTalk for long distance (2 cents a minute), but that aside we love the video feature of Skype obviously.
Good luck, hope that helps.
Peter, Charlotte & Dorothy.