This one's just a brief update about VOIP, phone over the internet.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked around about internet phone. I heard back various things and decided to look into Skype a bit more. My girlfriend has dial up and I have high speed ADSL. So, my primary concern was the dial up connection. Reading online, I ran into many different posts about dial up. It was a split decision. Some people said they had tons of trouble with dial up and bad signals, the call breaking up, poor sound quality etc. And many people also said that they had no trouble at all.

So, about a week ago, I bought us some cheap headsets to test it out and see what we think. Our local calls here are not free either, so it may be cheaper here to do it this way, not even just for overseas. It's cheaper for me for sure because I don't pay to dial up. She may be paying to dial up. We'll have to look into that more to see which is actually cheaper.

But, our early tests have been good. The sound is actually very good. It sounds a little digital, but not too bad at all. Just like a slight metallic tinge to the sound. Not as bad as I had expected at all. There doesn't really seem to be a delay or anything either. If there is one, it's so slight that I can't really notice. I think there's a bit of us looking for trouble more than there actually being any.

The software seems pretty easy so far. I cannot afford to buy any credits on it yet, as starting my company here in Croatia has tapped my bank account. But, it's cheap to get credits to call actual land lines. For me to call any landline in the States, for instance, is around 2.2 cents per minute. That's pretty great. Talk for ten minutes for 22 cents? Not bad at all.

And, when you're installing the Skype software, it also installs a plugin for Firefox. This plugin makes it so that when phone numbers are shown on websites, the phone number has a little green phone symbol next to it. So, to use Skype to call that phone number, I just click on that green phone right in the browser and Skype will call it. Skype also knows where I am and where the phone number is and sets the dial out code for other countries accordingly. That's pretty fucking great. It works in my e-mails in GMail too. So, when I get an e-mail from an editor at Marvel and they have their phone number in their signature, I can just click on it to call them in Skype, to their land line. *After* I buy credits, like I said.

Calling from one Skype member to another is totally free, though. And that's pretty great. No phone deal gets better than free.

Click on link to go to Skype's site:

Skype