VOIP With Skype
A few years ago, a group of people came up with Kazaa P2P sharing, shortly after Napster got shutdown. Whilst Kazaa continues to thrive today, the same people have gone onto to make super application that has a promising future. Enter Skype the latest in a slew of VOIP applications but this one comes with a twist. Its compatible with almost any platform you can find on the planet.
The boys(and girls) at Skype have been busy. What started as a WinTel only application has now evolved into a multi-platform application supporting, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and even your humble Pocket PC.
For those of you who don’t understand what all the Skype is about, VOIP or commonly known as Voice Over Internet Protocol is a technology that’s fast taking the telecommunicatons market by storm. Instead of using the traditional phone lines which incur high rental costs from the telco giants all around the world, VOIP utilises the existing WWW internet infrastructure to carry voice signals from point to point (P2P). This reduces trunk calling costs significantly but when VOIP was first pioneered the issue of voice clarity and lag was prominent.
If you’re using broadband as your umbelical cord to the WWW, chatting on Skype is not very different from chatting from your land line. The marked difference is that you can still afford to run out and shop with the savings you’ve made after chatting thru Skype. Then again, you can still Skype using a dial-up connection, you just have to bear with the pops, whizzes and occassional lag otherwise, its ok communications for the price.
But the boys(and girls) at Skype aren’t stopping their stampede just yet. The latest includes, the ability to conference call up to 4 others, call regular telephone/cell phone from your computer using Skype and also use Skype as an Instant Messenger (IM) application akin to the plethora of IMs already out there, eg AIM, ICQ, iChat, MSN Messenger, andYahoo Messenger.
In fact, one of the only restrictions is the requirement for a credit card to make payments to Skype after your call.
VOIP and convergence technologies between telcos and the web is the next wave of evolution for businesses but Skype’s for the masses.
Download your copy of Skype and start chatting!
