11-12-2003, 05:48 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Finally - VOIP that Really Works!
Completely off-topic, but I wanted to share with you all a very exciting program that a friend told me about last week. It's called Skype, and it was created by the makers of KaZaA - but it's not for file sharing, it's for voice chatting. There are three things that make Skype extremely impressive to me:
The voice quality is amazing - it's better than phone quality, and upon my first use the quality of my friends voice was so high is sounded like he was in the room with me. It was actually kind of eerie. :worried:
The software uses port 80, so it slips through firewalls without hassle, which means end users behind firewalls don't need to reconfigure ports. In fact, there's no configuration at all - it even dynamically selects the best voice codec for you depending on your bandwidth.
Most impressive of all, it works flawlessly from behind a NAT (network address translation) layer, meaning that those of us behind routers and gateways can actually use it.
They also have plans for having Skype dial regular land-line phones, and I've emailed them to ask about a Pocket PC version - wouldn't that be cool? The beta is free, but they'll eventually charge for the software and possibly a subscription-based service. Assuming they don't screw up a really great idea by charging too much for it per month, Skype could become the "next big thing". Check it out!
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