Skype

Full review
I’ve used Skype for about a year now. I use it both at home and on the road. This review summarizes my experience, and compares it to some of the alternatives I've tried.

At home I use Skype on my desktop PC, sometimes with a headset, but more commonly I just put on headphones and use the computer's microphone. I’ve even used it a few times with the speakers when there was no headset handy. Most recently I've been using a Vtech USB 7100 Skype-enabled cordless phone. At home I have an ADSL line with 1.5 Mbyte/sec down / 512 Kbytes/sec up, and my local telco ISP doesn’t seem to be doing any throttling of VoIP traffic.

On the road I use Skype on my laptop, usually with the built-microphone and a set of earbud headphones, so that there's not much extra to carry around.

Skype-to-Skype
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Skype-to-Skype calls generally have excellent fidelity, much better than normal telephone service. There are some added bonuses compared to using a telephone: calls are encrypted, and I can conveniently use the text chat window to write out things like urls or addresses, or send files and photos in addition to voice chat. The overall call experience depends a lot on the internet connection, which you can’t necessarily control. On a good connection, the call quality is excellent, the background noise is very low, and there are only very occasional minor dropouts or delays. Things deteriorate if the connection is slow or the latency is high. Occasionally there may be a slight delay of a half-second or so, followed by a faster-than-normal gabble as Skype judges that it can catch up rather than leaving a gap. If it’s worse than that, the voice disappears into a buzz for a moment, and the connection may drop. If the latency is consistently too high, more than about 200 msec, the conversation starts to get out of sync as people accidentally interrupt each other or start to hesitate for fear of doing so. But most of the time it’s fine between users with reasonably good high-speed internet connections.

Skype 2.0 added a video chat option. I've tested it briefly. It's not the best video service I've seen, but it's still in beta test. So far it only offers a small video window with few options, and it's quite slow (and slows the computer down noticeably too).

When used in this way, Skpe isn’t really much different from internet voice or video chat services which have been around for many years. I’ve used Netmeeting, Yahoo Voice Messenger, and ICQ previously, and Skype doesn’t have much extra to offer.

Skype really doesn’t work on dial-up lines, even with the best dial-up speeds available. Kind of surprising since some other voice chat services do work well enough on dial-up.

Conference calls with up to 4 people are allowed, but I've never had much success with it - the conference always seems to crash and dump everybody within minutes. There was a bit of a controversy over this feature recently when Skype announced support for conferencing up to 10 people - for the newest Intel processors only! Skype made some vague claim about the amount of processing power needed, but it was pretty clearly part of a marketing promotion with Intel. And it has been hacked for AMD processors already if anybody cares.

SkypeOut (calls to regular telephones)
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I’ve also used the paid SkypeOut service (calls to regular telephone numbers) for some time for both domestic and international calls. In general it works surprisingly well, even to distant countries. The voice quality is no better than regular telephone quality (no big surprise), but it’s usually at the better end of the normal range.

Occasionally Skype can’t connect, or crashes as soon as the connection is made, but it’s not frequent enough to be a serious problem. Sometimes I get a connection where the called party can hear me and I can’t hear them, or vice-versa. With some destinations the call drops frequently, so I may have to call back 2 or 3 times in the space of a 20-30 minute call. Annoying, but not a big deal with Skype. Three things keep me from getting overly annoyed:
- Most problems are temporary, and not repeated if I just try again
- Skype doesn’t charge for calls less than 10 seconds, so I can just hang up if I get a bad connection – or an answering machine
- Skype charges per minute with no connection fee, so I’m not losing much if a call is interrupted and I have to call back

Buying SkypeOut credit has been reasonably easy using credit card or Paypal. Originally everything was priced in euros, but now it’s also available directly in US$. Adding credit only takes a few minutes online, and Skype maintains an accurate billing record of calls made on your account. I’ve seen many other people complaining in the online forums about problems with Skype not accepting their credit cards, but personally I haven’t had any problem.

SkypeOut rates are no better than I can get from some long distance service providers and phone cards, but I end up using it a lot for overseas calls. Mainly just because it’s convenient when I’m at a computer, even if I’m not at home, and it’s easy to recharge the account online. Just to be clear, SkypeOut rates are set by destination country, regardless of whether you are calling from next door or the other side of the world. For a core group of first-world countries the rate is about 2 cents per minute, but I've encountered rates up about 25 cents per minute for some calls (e.g., in countries where you pay extra to call a cell phone).

I haven’t used SkypeOut as much within North America because our local phone rates are so cheap anyway, and SkypeOut still isn’t quite as reliable as regular phone. I have hesitated to use it for business purposes for fear that the quality of an individual call will turn out to be poor. I’ll probably use it more now that Skype is offering free SkypeOut service in Canada and the USA, and I have the Vtech Skype phone.

SkypeIn
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Skype also offers a paid SkypeIn service, which provides a personal telephone number which people can call you at. Numbers are available in various countries (including the USA, Europe, and Asia), which lets you have a local phone number in a different part of the world from where you live if you want. Incoming calls to that number are automatically redirected to your Skype service, so that you can receive them wherever you happen to be in the world. You don't even have to be online, since you can use forwarding via SkypeOut to forward the incoming call to any telephone number.

SkypeIn costs $38/year or $12 for 3 months. Voicemail is included. You can have up to 10 SkypeIn numbers per Skype account if you want, although multi-line users say that it's hard to tell which one is calling since Caller ID doesn't work. Unfortunately they don't offer local numbers in too many different countries yet, and not all cities in those countries, so the choices are somewhat limited.

As it happens, they do provide coverage in one of the cities in Brazil where I have friends and family, so I've just started a 3-month trial with a local SkypeIn number there. On the basis of just a few test calls so far, it seems to work, and the call quality is good. Calls do tend to drop once in a while, just as with SkypeOut. There's no perceptable delay while talking, even when the incoming call is being automatically forwarded via SkypeOut to my home telephone (a neat trick!).

I see that some users have complained in the forums about the number of rings it takes for forwarding to kick in, but nobody's mentioned it to me as a problem. I've asked callers how many times the phone rang for them before I picked up, and it seems to average about twice before I hear the ring.

Unfortunately Skype has prevented a loophole by still charging for forwarding SkypeIn calls originating outside the USA and Canada - too bad!

Using Skype on the road
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Skype on the laptop can be very useful for calling back to my home or office from other parts of the world, from anywhere I can get a high-speed internet connection. That includes most hotel rooms these days, and often airports and coffee shops as well via 802.11 wireless connection. If I’m lucky, I can score a free wireless connection somewhere. If not, there’s usually something like T-Mobile available. I love being able to sit and chat with people back home without worrying about the cost when I’m on the road, and it’s great for bypassing those ridiculously overpriced hotel long-distance fees. Unfortunately some hotels are now catching on and disabling Skype and other VoIP services on their networks to prevent you from bypassing their phones.

While SkypeOut calls to telephones within the USA and Canada are now free until the end of the year, watch out for the fine print: that applies only to calls made from within the USA and Canada. If you are calling home from overseas, you will still pay. But it’s only 2 cents per minute, so I still feel free to go crazy. :-)

Compared to Yahoo, Lycos, and Vonage VoIP services
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I used Yahoo Voice Messenger for voice chat long before I used Skype, and I don’t think that Skype is necessarily any better for that purpose. SkypeOut made the difference for me. Now of course Yahoo is offering a dial-out-to-telephone option too. I’ve tried it. It’s roughly comparable to Skype, but:
- Call quality and reliability to overseas destinations is not quite as good in my experience. A few times I got impatient with Yahoo’s failure to connect, and made the call on Skype instead.
- Rates are a little bit lower than Skype to some destinations, higher to others, but not enough to really matter

I also tried the Lycos VoIP service when it came out recently, since they were offering a free trial. The software was still a bit buggy, but I found it roughly comparable to Yahoo in quality. Potentially a bit cheaper though.

A couple of friends and family members have Vonage VoIP service, and I’ve had enough experience with their phones to make some comparisons. In general Vonage seems to work very well, with quality and reliability at least as good as Skype, although it’s also sensitive to low-speed or high-latency internet connections. It has the advantage of working without a computer, thanks to their dedicated internet interface boxes. That makes it a viable replacement for a regular phone (unlike Skype), especially if you have cable internet. It’s just that Vonage has packaged their service differently from Skype: instead of pay-as-you-go, you have to pay them a monthly fixed fee which only makes sense if you do a lot of calling within the USA and Canada.

I’ve ended up sticking mostly with Skype after my experiments with Yahoo and Lycos, because it’s cheap enough that the slightly better quality and reliability matters more.

Using Skype with the Vtech USB 7100 Skype phone
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Lately I’ve started using the Vtech USB 7100 Skype-enabled cordless phone at home (http://www.vtechcanada.com/en/products/voip/data/usb7100.htm). It works like a normal cordless phone, but the base station also connects to Skype on my desktop PC via a usb cable. On the handset I can receive incoming calls from either telephone or Skype, and I can make outgoing calls either via telephone or Skype. The LCD display on the handset shows me a scrollable list of my Skype contacts with their current online/offline status, and I can set my own Skype status from the handset. A different answer button flashes and a different ring tone sounds for incoming internet calls and telephone calls. I can make an internet call to any phone number using SkypeOut, which is especially useful now that SkypeOut is free in the USA and Canada until the end of 2006.

The Vtech unit works pretty well, both as a regular cordless phone and as a Skype phone. The added portability and convenience of the cordless phone makes up for the loss of quality compared to using a computer headset with Skype. I’ve compared the call quality of the Vtech unit using Skype and using the regular phone line, and compared it to a standard cordless phone, and they’re all equally good.

Too bad the Vtech still needs to be attached to the Skype application running on a computer, unlike some of the more expensive standalone devices that are now available which don’t require the computer. If the computer is shut off or suspends, the Skype calling function becomes unavailable. But overall, I think it's going to make using Skype a lot more convenient.

See http://dualphone.net/Admin/Public/DWSDownload.aspx?File=Files%2FFiler%2FPress%2FComparison_of_RTX_Linksys_Vtech_Feb_06.pdf
for a comparison of the Vtech to similar Skype cordless phones from RTX Telcom (DualPhone) and Linksys. The other two products are more expensive, but operate in the less-used DECT band (1.9 GHz), which potentially offers less interference with WiFi and other computer wireless devices operating in the 2.4 GHz band (not that I've had any problem with the Vtech so far).