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 Smartphone 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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11-12-2003, 11:36 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Oct 2003
Posts: 4
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Fabulous....at first glance
This appears to be the real deal. Spoke to someone in South Korea the other day, it seemed like he was in the room with me. No clips, garbled speech, etc.... This will be great once it gets to the smartphone (or for that matter to POTS)..... :roll:
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11-13-2003, 06:42 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 234
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Re: Fabulous....at first glance
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Originally Posted by bmarkman
This appears to be the real deal. Spoke to someone in South Korea the other day, it seemed like he was in the room with me. No clips, garbled speech, etc.... This will be great once it gets to the smartphone (or for that matter to POTS)..... :roll:
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Thats nice although if you think about it thats not so unbelievable. After all South Korea is the most wired nation in the world so should have good broadband links to allow this. Since broadband links can do 300kbps video easily, voice should be a piece of cake since you can do very good quality audio at less than 20kbps. Now I would be really impressed if someone has tried this to some of the less broadband enabled parts of the world and still experienced the same quality levels and good service. For now I shudder when I think of VOIP to any international location like that due to all the lag and bad quality that I've seen (heard actually).
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11-13-2003, 07:12 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 234
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Re: Fabulous....at first glance
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Originally Posted by ShivShanks
voice should be a piece of cake since you can do very good quality audio at less than 20kbps
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Okay before someone jumps on me I should qualify that you can do very good quality spoken audio at 20kbps and not anything music related 
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11-13-2003, 11:55 AM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 35
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You managed to get my mouth watering with the idea of a version for smartphone. All you would need is a working wi-fi SD card and then I could sit near a convenient hotspot and never pay a cent in phone calls .... sweeet! :lol:
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11-13-2003, 03:42 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Oct 2003
Posts: 21
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by koriel
You managed to get my mouth watering with the idea of a version for smartphone. All you would need is a working wi-fi SD card and then I could sit near a convenient hotspot and never pay a cent in phone calls .... sweeet! :lol:
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Or even better, pay Verizon for unlimited PDA data and get unlimited worldwide calling for $49.99, plus a small charge for calls to non-Skype users. Daytime minutes would be old news.
Or $20 (or was it $30?) for unlimited data from T-Mobile
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11-13-2003, 04:43 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 361
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Re: Fabulous....at first glance
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Originally Posted by bmarkman
This appears to be the real deal. Spoke to someone in South Korea the other day, it seemed like he was in the room with me. No clips, garbled speech, etc.... This will be great once it gets to the smartphone (or for that matter to POTS)..... :roll:
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Can you speak at the same time, or is it still like a walkie-talkie? It's been a while since I've given VOIP a try.
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11-13-2003, 05:21 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Oct 2003
Posts: 4
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Re: Fabulous....at first glance
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Can you speak at the same time, or is it still like a walkie-talkie? It's been a while since I've given VOIP a try.
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[/quote]
It's in real time..... I suppose that voip on a broadband connection would imply high quality, after all, Vonage has been doing this for sometime, but not P2P. The real test is through a 56K connection. HAs anyone tried it?
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11-17-2003, 04:24 PM
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07-31-2004, 02:08 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 70
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Re: Finally - VOIP that Really Works!
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