Skype rocks!
I've got a lowly 192k line and I'm astonished how good Skype Voice-over-IP works! I always thought that a drawback of ADSL would be the shaping, rendering VoIP useless, and maybe I'm just lucky, but the quality is superb.
I phoned a friend in London using my standard Telkom landline, and simultaneously we connected via Skype. With my one ear in the telephone and the other in my headphones we could compare the two calls. Astonishingly the free Skype call was of better quality than the expensive Telkom call.
I'm now trying to use SkypeOut to phone my friends on their cellphones in London for 11c per minute. The only hiccup is getting my South African credit card accepted on the Skype site!
Anyone with conflicting experiences?
Another point worth noting is that there is a furious debate on the Internet about just how much bandwidth Skype eats when idle. Remember Skype is a P2P network and if your client is open you're likely to be part of the call routing process. I measured the total bandwidth over 24 hours with Skype on idle only, and it came to 145k uploaded and 190k upload. That rolls up to only 10Meg of the cap per month. Again, maybe I was just lucky and wasn't used for any routing of calls...
I've got a lowly 192k line and I'm astonished how good Skype Voice-over-IP works! I always thought that a drawback of ADSL would be the shaping, rendering VoIP useless, and maybe I'm just lucky, but the quality is superb.
I phoned a friend in London using my standard Telkom landline, and simultaneously we connected via Skype. With my one ear in the telephone and the other in my headphones we could compare the two calls. Astonishingly the free Skype call was of better quality than the expensive Telkom call.
I'm now trying to use SkypeOut to phone my friends on their cellphones in London for 11c per minute. The only hiccup is getting my South African credit card accepted on the Skype site!
Anyone with conflicting experiences?
Another point worth noting is that there is a furious debate on the Internet about just how much bandwidth Skype eats when idle. Remember Skype is a P2P network and if your client is open you're likely to be part of the call routing process. I measured the total bandwidth over 24 hours with Skype on idle only, and it came to 145k uploaded and 190k upload. That rolls up to only 10Meg of the cap per month. Again, maybe I was just lucky and wasn't used for any routing of calls...
