Skype’in it
Oct 4th, 2005 by Sandra
There’s such a thing as too much connectivity sometimes….
Came across Skype earlier this year and decided to download the program. It’s a voice-over-IP application that lets you talk (for free) with other Skype users over the internet. Skype is a Norwegian company run by the guys who designed the original (non-spamming, non-malware) KaZaa peer-to-peer file sharing application. Skype functions in much the same way: it routes “calls” through various Skype-running PCs to create an unlimited network.
It’s genius, really. No central server to have to maintain, no limitation on the number of users that can be supported. The more users running Skype, the larger and more dispersed the network can be.
They’ve introduced other features: SkypeOut, which lets you make PC-to-phone calls; SkypeIn, which lets you lease a phone number anywhere in the world that regular phone users can call to talk to you on your computer; and VoiceMail.
The problem is with the billing. Skype has clearly grown really fast (almost 4 million users online even as I write this) and seems to be suffering from growing pangs. The forums are covered up with technical billing problems I won’t reiterate here. Suffice to say I’ve encountered some of these problems.
Another problem is that the SkypeOut sound quality, which used to be fantastic, has degraded somewhat with drop-out. PC2PC calls seem to be fine (the dSO and I can chat online with no problems) but the SkypeOut calls suffer enough drop-out to prevent it really being viable for PC2Phone calls.
I’m hoping this settles down over the next few months. I’d love to be able to use SkypeOut and SkypeIn for my phone calls because it works out to be much, much cheaper than a regular phone. I could drop my cell down to the lowest number of minutes plan available but still keep it for emergency use (Skype doesn’t support 911, etc.).
But the dSO is a technology slut, so perhaps he’ll come up with something else here soon….