Who hasn't wanted hassle free voice chat? I've tried various ways to talk on the net for free over the last 6 years, since I got my first internet connection. So let me start.
In the beginning, it was silent over the vast expanses of cyberspace, where the bitstreams raced across the myriad routers and switches. And the people, they got carpal tunnel syndrome from typing furiously at each other and they were tired of overblown telephone bills. And so voice chat was born.
A few attempts at voice telephony took off, and around 2000, ICQ launched voice capabilities in their IM software.
Those were the days, when VoIP was officially illegal in India, and attempts to talk to friends in other cities/countries usually consisted of 'hi, can you hear me?' rather than any meaningful talk. Besides, how much could our pathetic dialup connections really support?
When I saw Skype first in August 2003, I was skeptical. What held out new hope was their technology-they used P2P or peer to peer networking, on the lines of Napster/Kazaa software, except that instead of swapping files, this was being used to hold voice chat. (As an aside: The guys behind Skype are the same ones who licensed the FastTrack P2P technology to Sharman Networks, who developed it into Kazaa). The software installs painlessly on Windows 98/Me/2000/XP
The first person I spoke to was a friend in the US, who happened to be online on Yahoo messenger at the time. We both installed it, registered (i.e. created usernames for ourselves, it's free), added ourselves to each others lists, like any instant messaging client, and got busy!
-The voice quality was simply INCREDIBLE. I had a hard time believing it was not over the phone-voice quality was perfect, without any echoes, or delays, as is more common with other voice chat-MSN and Yahoo primarily.
-We were not convinced, so we tried again and again over several days, and each time, the experience was 100% noise/jitter/delay free!
-However- please note that I have a 128Kb DSL line from Touchtel, and he has a 300KBps cable modem in the US.
This may bring out skeptics among readers who use dialup (in India, they are the majority anyway, and I too was one of them till last year! ), but although I have not tested it over a dialup connection, I have heard similar stories from friends who have.
Now that the main purpose of the software is established, let's look at the other features.
-The software is absolutely free,muft,gratis! It has absolutely NO adware or spyware built in, and you can use it without any obligation
-The software is designed to look and feel like other IM software, so it is rather familar and intuitive to use. You search for and add contacts to your list, and are notified when they come online, just like yahoo or MSN. You can even do a conventional text chat with them.
-It does not provide a notification in the task bar when someone signs in or leaves, however.
-Skype has a friend finder where you can search for people by age, gender, country
mobile phone etc. You can create a profile, upload a picture etc, just like any online community.
-A call logging feature shows the list of calls made or received along with date and time. You can erase it if you like.
-All communications, voice or text chat, are encrypted so the paranoid need not worry about conversations being snooped upon.
-It has support for multiple languages -Western european, as well as chinese and korean, for those who would want that feature.
-It supports CONFERENCE CALLS. You can invite several friends, and all of you can talk to each other (I've tested it reliably with 3 people together)
-The latest version also has a paid PC-to-phone calling facility, at rates that are still cheaper than international calls.
-Support for HTTP proxies has been added, so that firewalled users can still try it.
So, get your outstation friends to download Skype, and say goodbye to old, expensive telephone calls or mobile bills forever!
