Skype

[Soldier]

http://www.skype.com

It's a type of voice-chat program; works very well. I also enjoy it because it actually allows the voice connection through our firewalls.

Who has it? What names?

[Zelda]

You know I do......

[Gav]

Reviving this as I am thinking of trying skype out. Does anyone have any comments?

[sabreur]

Gav,

Looks interesting--I'll probably sign up on my home computer and see if I can't get some of the folks I call in the US to also sign up.

MR

[DJ Apostrophe]

It works pretty well... one of our R&D guys just took a trip to Asia (specifically, Hong Kong, China, and South Korea) ... brought a laptop and used skype to call home / the office... worked rather well for him...

one of our other R&D folks is going to Italy next week... her laptop will have skype on it as well.

-w

[Have At You]

Very nice to talk long-distance for free, conference calling between a bunch of different countries, IM-ing and surfing and sending links at the same time. Yet another reason to ditch the land phone, if you haven't already.

I read in the paper a couple of weeks ago that the major US land-line phone companies actually use this technology for fast free switching, but keep it a secret from their customers to keep the prices the same.

[Soldier]

Skype is awesome. So far I've spent probably ten hours talking to my girlfriend (who's currently in Germany), for about 7.50 euros. If you're not calling somebody's landline, then it's completely free to use - and extremely clear sound.

[Gav]

It certainly looks like a good deal. I need to phone BT and see if I can get a "line only" deal, or try other telcom's companies if that's not possible. It sounds paranoid, but I wonder at the security of it all. With governments whipping up fear, and asking ISPs to monitor traffic, it seems easy be to spied upon. The other aspect is that I can't think of anyone that I know who uses skype [or similar], so there would still be the matter of cost. All very interesting; I see big changes in communication over the next 2-5 years.

[Have At You]

Well, any government interception would be subject to the rules already in place for intercepting communications. So there's no gain or loss of privacy.

Except Skype is very well encrypted, and IIRC law enforcement does not have the capability to intercept encrypted communications. (The NSA is a different matter, but they're probably not interested in any of us.)

[Epee_Pox]

Seventy-Four Million Skypers --
And Counting

By BRUNO GIUSSANI
February 23, 2005

Don't you love using Skype ? What's that? You don't use it? Well, here is a short story that may inspire you to try it out. My friend Susan (she's the CEO of a company in Zurich) recently sent me a one-line e-mail: "Time to skype on Thursday 8 a.m.? I will be in New York." I did have time, so we skyped . She was in her hotel room in Manhattan and I was having coffee on the porch of a friend's home in Miami, where I was visiting. She was speaking into her laptop, connected free of charge to the hotel's wireless hub. I was talking into mine, linked to my friends' home wireless network. We spoke for almost an hour over a crisp clear line -- free. (Well, Susan did pay for the hotel room and my friends pay for their DSL connection, but the marginal cost of the hour-long long-distance discussion was zero.)

We were using a small piece of free software -- called Skype -- that 74 million people have already downloaded (at skype.com; it works with Windows, Mac and Linux) and that many believe is the code that will bury traditional telephones. Yes, we have heard similar hyperbolic forecasts before. A decade ago, at the inception of the commercial Internet, a few visionary companies such as Israel's Vocaltec launched the idea of making voice calls from one personal computer to the other. But until recently voice over Internet protocol -- VOIP -- didn't really deliver on that vision.

Now it does, mostly because of dramatic advances in voice technology and of the rapid increase in broadband subscribers. (VOIP is a technology that circumvents traditional phone networks by carrying calls over high-speed Internet connections, converting our "analog" voices into digital packets that can travel through the network and, at destination, be reassembled and reconverted back into an analog form that our ears can hear and our brain can comprehend).

As Niklas Zennström, one of the founders of Skype in London, told me during a recent interview (conducted via Skype , of course), "once you have paid for a broadband connection, it doesn't make sense to pay also for a phone subscription." In other words, telephony becomes just a software application at the edges of the network. An Internet client.

Despite all the skepticism that surrounds the notion of giving away (as Skype does) a service that the telecom operators charge for, this is serious stuff. Sure, the "free" price tag alone is for many an unbeatable proposition. (And don't be fooled: There is a lot of money in "free," as many companies have demonstrated in recent years.) It is serious because of what happened during my conversation with Susan. Using Skype 's file-transfer feature, we exchanged documents and pictures related to the project we were discussing in real-time. We Googled information and shared it immediately by sending links to one another through Skype 's instant-messaging tool. And at a certain point we needed to ask our colleague Alberto for an update. My Skype "buddy list" showed that he was online, probably in his office in Lugano, Switzerland. We suspended the discussion for five seconds, the time it took me to set up a Skype conference call with six clicks, and there we were, the three of us, talking freely and for free across the ocean.

That's what really makes VOIP so potentially disruptive (Skype is just its most aggressive incarnation; I expect it to ignite a VOIP-boom this year). When a phone call becomes a mere application on the network, then it can interact and converge with many other applications and with online presence (the information provided by the "buddy list") to create a rich, dynamic and amazingly flexible communication environment.

Which isn't to say that Skype is perfect. It isn't. It's early stage. Sometimes calls drop, or the voice quality is bad (I wouldn't worry instead about the call's privacy, though, since it is 256-bit-encrypted). But for 120 years there was only one way to make a voice call: the telephone. Now VOIP allows entities that are not telecoms and don't behave like telecoms (call them softcoms) to offer voice services and build a range of other features around them. There is VOIP built in to the Xbox gaming platform (so that players can talk while playing). There is Apple's iChat. There is Skype -- and a myriad of other offerings, aimed both at consumers and corporations. True, businesses are less sensitive to price and to the "cool" factor and more attuned to quality of service and flexibility. That's exactly why they are also looking at VOIP with a lot of interest. As for the telecom operators, while publicly projecting confidence they are all nervously scrambling to carry as much traffic as possible (for the most part, unbeknownst to their customers) over VOIP. It's cheaper and gives them more flexibility, too.

[Mr. Giussani, a Swiss writer, is an affiliated fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies and author of "Roam: Making Sense of the Wireless Internet" (Random House).]