Anyone use skype?

[Sven]

Yesterday I found the phone bill for my workshop.
It was 99% subscription! So I started thinking of alternatives.

Skype was the first thing that came to mind, this seems to have some great advantages:


Free calls for skypers
Unlimited calls to landlines within the EU for a low fee (world for a bit higher fee)
Within that same low fee you can get a land based phone number so non-skypers can still call you. These are not yet available in Holland but since most of my customers are from the UK I'd get a UK number.
My business phone would be where I open my laptop, even if I were to go sailing abroad


Do any of you have experience in this set up? Any disadvantages?
Have you used it with wireless broadband?
Any good alternatives to skype?

[kamakiri]

Sven - Skype rocks. I use it all the time. Since I got married 9 years ago, my wife and I haven't had a land line. That is fine for normal use here in Japan, but not for international calls, as in if I wanted to call my family. I purchased a skype handset (http://www.asia.ru/en/ProductInfo/855191.html), plugged it into my lap top, and haven't used $10 in the last 4 months.

Do any of you have experience in this set up? Any disadvantages?

I have wifi in my house and a decked out gaming PC in my office. Initially I hooked the phone up to my rig, but quickly disconnected it. My sound card is hooked up by fiber optics to my 400 watt 10 speaker (and a sub) stereo, and there is no way to route it to other speakes, and with the phone plugged in, there is no audio.

Of course with your lap top, it shouldn't be a problem. I solved my problem by just hooking up the phone to one of my lap tops. It is an 800mhz antique with 128megs of ram. Skype sounds mostly fine over the PCMCIA card wireless modem, but I have had one call dropped. One call in 6 months is more than acceptable for me though.

Have you used it with wireless broadband?

I am sure that the quality is better the faster your modem and the better the connection.

Any good alternatives to skype?

I haven't found anything close in terms of ease of use. Google talk is great, but setting up accounts and getting/training others to use it is a challenge. I can buy local phone numbers in both Japan and the USA that people can use to call my skype account for nothing. A quick look tells me that it costs $60 for a US number. Well worth it if you get a lot of calls from the US, and it looks more professional than a skype address.

The program is free, and the phones are also very cheap. I haven't tried a head set, but wouldn't want to. I just dont like them. It just feels like I am on the phone when I have a 'real' phone in my hand.

[timwhistle]

I love it as well. Last year I canceled home phone service and use Skype for personal and business calls as well as overseas calls. On a recent trip to Europe it was fantastic because I could go into an Internet cafe and lot into my account. My calls from there were still just pennies. This will make me incredibly (and affordably) mobile as I move forward with my next adventures....

Good luck.

[Sven]

Thnks guys,
Time for some trials!

[webgal]

I used skype. I have a headset I bought from best buy. But I'm in serious need of a new computer. I'll be getting a mad and I hear it's really easy to skype with that.

[Sven]

Well, I ditched Skype. Again.

It was soooo promissing but it turned out to be so very dissapointing.

I immediatly took a skypeln number so that people, especially in th UK, could easily call me without breaking the bank.

The procedure to get this number wasn't very easy but even worse, it turned my subsribtion in to a real mess! I got totally lost in how to pay for this subsribtion, I got notifications that told me to do something and when I tried to find out how to do that I discovered I didn't have to because of an automatic top up...

The website that you need to visit to manage your subscription lets you run round in circles but does not let you firgure out what to do. It switches back and forth from English to Dutch which does nog help and it is impossible to set English as the main language.

It is so horrible to use that it has to be owned by an angry brother of Microsoft.

But after I had decided to stop using it two customers tried to contact me trough regular skype (not the land based UK phone number) and I made a 40 euro 15 minute call to New Zealand on my cell.

So I reinstalled it with the idea only to use the free basic skype functionality.

I installed a "skype me" button on my website, the concept of which I really like, and then got spammed 4 times within the first hour. I then tried to ring a company that has the same kind of button on their site, only to get a message that I had to install the latest version of skype. Had it been upgraded 1 hour after my fresh instalation???

Then I went back to my own website. The buttons no longer worked....

I am willing to tolerate a bit of difficulty when using a free product. With with this piece of junk I would want to get paid a full salary just to have it on my computer.

skype sucks on a scale I can not even grasp!

[kamakiri]

Wow. My use of skype is by no means mission critical, but apart from the occasional dropped call, it has worked fine. I suppose, on the flip side, that I really don't use the phone (cell or skype) anyway.

Did you move to a new ip phone company?

[sadu]

I have had a few challenges with my SIP-based VoIP setup, though of a different nature. I read some bad reviews about Skype when I was doing the research and opted for SIP based VoIP instead. Mainly because Skype is proprietary, and there are a number of issues that go along side with that.

With a SIP provider, you can tell them to stick it if you need to and can generally keep your number. You have much more choice of hardware and aren't tied to the quirks of one particular hardware device.

Having a proper handset is a must. I like the reliability of a dedicated handset that doesn't require the laptop to be turned on or not in standby mode etc. And as mentioned by Kamikiri, Skype's intefering with your PC audio is a major hassle if you are using it regularly.

My biggest problem with VoIP has been securing half-decent broadband while I'm travelling, anything wireless doesn't usually cut it. I have found Skype to be slightly more robust on a dodgy connection, but there isn't much in it.

[kamakiri]

That was a quick and painless fix actually. I leave my cordless handset plugged in all the time now.

[Sven]

I do have a voip line that is cheap and easy to use at home (without pc) but I actually want to have a way of opening the laptop and then make cheap calls. I have tried to get voip on my macbook but haven't figured out how to get that working. (I feel a question for the faq section comming up)

I am now looking at Jajah which is a phone service that uses (or allows you to use) internet to set up a connection between two phones.

Jajah and skype offer the possibility of adding a button to your website, the visitor clicks and the connection is set up. The skype button can show if you are actually available, the jajah button can actually let you set times at which you can or can not be reached. Even though jahjah seems a lot clearer than skype I did find some stuff about the rules of their thing on their website that I do not fully understand which is not an encouragement.

Ideally one could set up two buttons, one for a cheap connection during my officehours and one and one for urgent calls outside office hours.

I do feel that having a button like this on my website would encourage people to call. It does seem that some people enjoy talking to the person selling the stuff.

[sandyvgowda]

I am a Virtual Assistant and I use Skype to communicate with my clients. Its a WONDERFUL tool connecting people from all over the world. I highly recommend it :)