Not a question as much as a review
I moved recently, not far, but far enough that I'd have to change my phone number. I'm not a big fan of the phone and I think we're generally ripped off by our local providers for POTS (plain old telephone service, an industry acronym). I thought about going all celular and tried it for a few weeks, it's ok but I find I'm pretty nervous about going over minutes.
I'm going someplace with this, trust me.
So then I thought about VOIP (voice over internet proticol) since I have cable internet and more bandwidth than I know what to do with. I looked around at various providers and decided that they weren't worth the price. Then I came across Skype. It's a freeware peer to peer (P2P) system with no central network for computer to computer calls (incidentally developed by the people who brought you Kazaa). It's also free for any computer to computer call. Yeah, so I can do the same thing with MS Messenger but since messenger isn't P2P (all calls and messages route though a central system) the quality is attrocious, no really it's worse than that. The computer to computer 'call' quality on Skype is POTS quality or better, even when I'm downloading some public domain music or whatnot at high volume.
Ok, but how does this solve the phone problem? Skype also has a computer to POTS service. Yup, I can call just about any phone anywhere from my computer, calls to US phones are about 2cents/minute regardless of distance. Calls to many European countries are cheaper. Again call quality is so good the people I've called had no idea I wasn't calling from a regular land line.
So, for the price of a microphone or headset for my computer (~ $15 for a cheap but good enough unit), .5 minutes of download and 4 minutes of install I've joined the VOIP revolution, I'm never getting a land line again. My only wish is that Skype was a publicly traded company, these guys are going to remake telephony.
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