Tonight, I made my first telephone call over the Internet using the wonderful SkypeOut service from Skype. The sound quality, while not quite as good as a land-line, was good enough to fool my dad. I didn’t let him know I was calling him over the Internet until about fifteen minutes into the call. It was definately a Folger’s Crystals1 moment.
It’s pretty easy to use. All it takes is a decent computer with a microphone and speakers. It’s better if you have a cheap headset with a boom microphone laying around the house somewhere, but the built-in mic might work OK, too.
Once you’ve downloaded the software and installed it, you’ll have to get an account (just the standard username/password kind of thing). From there, you can make free calls to other users of the Skype software, or you can make calls to the old school telephone network using SkypeOut, which is really cheap at €0.017 a minute (which comes out to about 2.5¢ a minute, which is about half the price of the cheapest long distance you can buy).
The best thing is that, unlike many companies who only seem to like supporting Wintel PCs, they offer the client for the rest of us as well: Mac OS X, Linux and even PocketPC are fully supported.
Anyways, I’m sorry to make such a shameless plug, but I’m definately impressed by Skype.
1 Remember the ad? You know… “We’ve secretly replaced Miss Habersham’s elegant French-Pressed coffee with Folger’s Crystals. Let see if she notices the difference.” (Which, if she weren’t a paid shill for Proctor & Gamble, she would.)