CHEAPEST PC TO PC VOICE COMMS??

[Nowhere]

Hi.

I work in the DRC and the family is in SA and I need a cheap/practical way to talk to them every day. At home we have a 384 DSL line and in the DRC we have internet connections with unknown speed. Skype does not give good performance as it keeps "stuttering".

Can I use some type of VOiP phone on both sides? Do these use less bandwidth than Skype without video?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[mo_to]

Hi.

I work in the DRC and the family is in SA and I need a cheap/practical way to talk to them every day. At home we have a 384 DSL line and in the DRC we have internet connections with unknown speed. Skype does not give good performance as it keeps "stuttering".

Can I use some type of VOiP phone on both sides? Do these use less bandwidth than Skype without video?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

Hi

Do they have a fixed IP in the DRC? If they do, you may look at Cheapcall.co.za , if not, then I'm afraid the service will be of no use to you due to security reasons.

 

[Lounger]

Xfire. It's for games, but works just as well as any other.

 

[ponder]

Skype has a pretty efficient codec as I recall being able to use it via dialup without issues.

Is the DRC internet access via terrestrial cable or via sattelite?

If it's sattelite it's going to suck irrespective of what you use.

Do a traceroute from your location in the DRC to the family routers WAN IP address and post the output here so we can check the route and latency involved.

To make any voip work better on crappy links I suggest you adjust your MTU & TCP window sizes way down to like 512 so it's more suitable for dialup. I've found that the smaller packets work better on crappy links.

 

[agentrfr]

If all else fails, get Teamspeak 3 on both computers, set up a channel and use the speex 2kb/s codec... best one I know of. Set the buffer for the channel at 1 to 2 seconds. That aught to solve all issues. PM me if you need me to host a TS server with a static IP.

 

[Nowhere]

Thank you all for the comments. I will have a look at these when I get back up there. In SA at the moment.