There was a thread a while ago suggesting Skype for plug usage. I have been using skype for past months or so and its been a greate experience so i thought i would inform you guies about it. (Although mailing list is quite more suitable for plug activity IMHO. )
One reason for sending the review here is that this is the only VoIP service (Atleast as far as i know) which has a supported linux client. The client ofcourse is _not_ _free_ (as in free speech) but only free as in free beer. The client comes in variety of packages and all should work without problem, its based on qt so you will need qt libs. There is also a statically linked version for the gnome users, which will work almost everywhere. The most remarkable thing about skype is that the client can use an http/https proxy, and hence works from behind almost all corporate firewalls. This was the killing point as most of the other VoIP services did not work in my office (Free bandwidth). The voice quality is also a tad bit superior to others i have used so far (net2phone and yahoo messenger). It seems to be excellant choice between b/w and quality. It feels mostly like realplayer's speech quality encoding. Rarely though there is a missed packate here and there and you will hear a correcting noise whistle, but this really is rare. Another killing feature was the cheapest rates to international landlines. Many EU and north american countries cost only 1.7 EU cents / min thats approximately 1 Rs / min. + bandwidth costs. With Dataone this will be an ISD killer. I have been using this for a month now and it doesn't feel ne different than calling from a landline. You have to buy 10EUROs minimum to start with. Also the service is far more reliable than net2phone which i had tried some six months back. It was plagued with freaquently dropped calls and high rates to EU countries. The bandwidth requierement is also very low (33kbps minimum) and really works well over even dialup line the only problem is vsnl connectivity drops every now and then disturbing your call too much... i don't think other dialup providers will be any diferrent. Ofcourse Skype-Pc to Skype-Pc is free and is as good as calling landlines atleast inside india. After getting DataOne in pune I am using it regularly to talk with home from bangalore, this brought down my phone costs dramatically. Although calling indian landlines is costlier than normal std calls. The linux version is almost complete and equivalent to windows counterpart except that linux version can not yet host conferences while windows version can host them and upto 4 people (including those with linux client) can join it. The linux client uses /dev/dsp and works well with ALSA-oss emulation, there is no support yet for artsd or esd and likes so you have to stop other apps using /dev/dsp before you can make a call. All in all a good quality application and service, almost as good as ICQ was when it was launched for the first time. -- BAIN http://abhijit.adotout.net -- ______________________________________________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List: ([email protected]) List Information: http://plug.org.in/mailing-list/listinfo/plug-mail Send 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for mailing instructions.
