Skype - Voice over IP

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When —last October— I first discovered Skype, a free Voice Over IP application, I was amazed to see the application reporting that there "969,077 Users Online." That was nothing. I checked just now, and the Skype status dialog reports there are "2,984,226 Users Online." The correlation between users on-line at one time and total users isn't exact, but it is pretty safe to say that Skype use has tripled in the last ten months. A few weeks ago there were rumors that Rupert Murdoch was negotiating to pay $3 Billion for Skype. Skype is a big deal. Even without the Murdoch news, anyone who has ever tried Skype knew it was big.

By now, everyone must know that Skype enables peer to peer Voice-over-IP with remarkably high quality.

It seems almost indispensable to someone who needs to make international calls, as it cuts the cost to zero. It is also extremely valuable for conference calls, as it will support the host, plus four other Skype users. I've also got SkypeIn, which provides a land-line number that rings my Skype application on the PC, and with SkypeOut, you can call to land-lines for about 2.3 cents per minute. It's an amazaing revolution, and after using this, people would be crazy to purchase any stock in traditional copperwire telco companies.

Two years ago, I bought one of these: usbbt100C2.jpg because I had a PalmOne T3 PDA with Bluetooth, and I thought a Bluetooth dongle might come in handy. It didn't.... that is until I found out about SkypeHeadset, a program that links Skype to a Bluetooth headset. So I bought one of these: logitechbluetoothheadset.jpg and got to work. A hour or so later, my Skype calls now cause a beep in my Bluetooth headset and I can easily answer them. I find I can wander all over the place and carry on a conversation. It's extrememly handy. The Linksys dongle is Class 1, meaning that its range is up to 100 meters. This might come in handy for remote printers or my PDA if I ever figure out how to get it working! Since the adaptor is two years old, it only supports version 1.1 of the Bluetooth protocol, but I'd get something that supported version 1.2 or 2.0 if I was buying a dongle today.

Finally, here is a neat website for Skype developers and cutting edge Skype users: Skype Journal. Welcome to the Revolution!

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This page contains a single entry by Paul published on August 19, 2005 8:51 AM.

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