teamspeak instead of skype for lengthy conversation?

Hey.

from what i work out u can easily use less than a tenth of the bandwith using teamspeak than using skype in a 2 way conversation and i would just like to confirm this. My girlfrend lives in an area with bad cellphone reception and no DSL coverage. i took out an 500 meg 3g contract for her so we can use skype instead but i read somewhere that skype uses 60 meg an houer for audio conversation. 500 / 60 = only 8.3 houers a month! Ive looked at teamspeak as an alternitive and ive done a quick calculation using the speex 7.2 codec and as ive worked it out it will only use 3-6 megs an houer (depending on how much we talk simotaniously ) speex 7.2 isnt exactly crystal clear but its better than using cellphone because of the bad reception (but even if i go higher itl still be ALOT less than skype). I would just like to know if my facts/calculations are correct.

Thnx in Advance!

As far as I know teamspeak is used a lot during gaming so I would imagine that it is heavily optimised to have the least impact possible on your internet.

I wouldnt be surprised if it uses a lot less than skype.

Teamspeak and another app called Ventrilo are used alot in gaming yes. The Speex codec makes the app operable for Mac users from what I understand, so you could mess around with the codec thats used if you are running the teamspeak server.

The problem that I have had using these applications is the latency that can get introduced - eg. in a worst case scenario I have heard sentances that were spoken an entire minute beforehand. That would depend on a) your internet connection and b) where the server is located. If you have a local TS server available to you, this would be way better than Skype imo - Skype has generally good performance, but its not reliable, and yes Skype does chew through data at an incredible speed!

The advantage (in this case a disadvantage ) with Skype's codec is that is has the ability to adapt to network characteristics through control of bitrate, packet rate, packet loss resilience etc. You have a decent connection, and the bandwidth usage increases - bad connection, bandwidth usage decreases...