VoIP

Just a brief¹ comment on VoIP – Nathan Torkington blogs about his First steps in VoIP. In it he mentions Skype which frequent readers (if I have any) will know I’ve used quite a bit.

He wanted VoIP so that he could communicate with his family back home whilst on trips. At the moment I’ve mainly used it to communicate with family abroad instead of spending money on phone calls, and it works admirably well for this – as Skype say on their website:

Better sound quality than your regular phone

…and it’s true – a call to Australia sound better on Skype than they do on BT!

The trouble with VoIP is too many options. As well as Skype², there’s X-Lite (as mentioned by Nathan in his blog), Linspire have released the PhoneGaim plugin for Gaim, and of course you can use MSN Messenger for voice calls – except I could never get MSN to work with firewall, and Skype worked out of the box. By no means an exhaustive list, but a start…

I think VoIP definitely has a place in the modern internet, and as broadband³ becomes more ubiquitous there will be a greater emphasis on using it.

¹ Okay, it ended up not being that brief!

² Skype have recently released version 1.0 for Microsoft Windows and Pocket PC, and 0.91 for Linux.

³ I’ve finally got a date for ADSL! 15/12/2004 – w00t!