Skype

[jayfurr]

Does anyone out there use Skype? My parents, for some odd reason, are all enthusiastic about it. It's not a financial boon for Carole and me since we pay a flat minimum fee to our localtelco for long distance and only pay additional charges if we exceed 400 minutes, which we never do.

But my parents use it to talk to my sister and her family in Germany (where my brother in law is doing his Fulbright scholarship) and by extension I could use it for the same purpose if I really felt like talking trans-Atlantic. Since Skype users don't pay for calls to other Skype users, calls to my sister in Germany would be free.

To make my parents happy I ordered a Logitech USB headset and signed up for Skype and talked to them briefly this afternoon. If they want to call me via Skype I guess that's fine; I have no idea what their long distance plan looks like so it might be cheaper for them to call me that way.

Comments

[goldenlily.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I use it for talking to my family in France and England. The only problems are that sometimes it can get pretty bad line quality, but then I'm not paying for it, so whatever. :)

[zakmckracken.livejournal.com]

Some of the lawfirms I've worked at use Skype, but I don't have any friends who have used it. Bunk and I have voice-over IP through Speakeasy & the service includes free calls to (almost) anywhere in the world, so I've never explored Skype. I used an internet dialer a while back (1995 or so) and the quality was really bad.. but I'm assuming many of the problems I had then have been fixed over the years.

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

The audio quality is excellent assuming you have DSL. I called my wife at work with Skype today, Skype-to-landline, and she was surprised to learn that it wasn't normal telephony. She said I sounded completely normal. When I talked to my parents, Skype-over-DSL to Skype-over-cablemodem, it sounded just fine too. If you had a crappy DSL or cablemodem connection, or a congested local network, it'd probably sound bad.