Skype... what's all the hype?
 

So apparently Skype isn't free to call regular phones.

So how's the free one let you talk to people? Is it any different than iChat speech or AIM with Talk feature? I'm confused... again.

One person I know calls his grandfather oversees. The grandfather has no computer, not knows how to use one. He has a phone, and knows how IT works. So calling overseas to an actual phone is very inexpesive with Skype. I think that is what the hype is all about.

That and it's cross-compatible over different operating systems. Let's my conference with my windows friends while playing unreal 2k4... :-)

Dale

If you don't make many long distance phone calls, it may be cheaper for one to just buy some minutes on Skype for 10 euro than to sign up for any long distance plan, that's the case for me anyway. Depending on where you call, 10 euro can get you hours of minutes.

Skype's interface isn't too bad either, considering it's cross-platform.

The background of the developers and the use of closed, proprietary standards are both good enough reasons not to use it.

Especially given the daily growing availability of standard-compliant VoIP-equipment of all sorts.

There is indeed a lot of hype and only slightly scaring substance in Skype.

The reason I use it is because it works across NAT routeres without any fiddling. It's the only free (computer to computer) VOIP that I know of that does. I'm all for open standards but in a case like this I'll use what works.

I know nothing about Skype but your post intrigues me. Can you prove some links regarding the "background of the developers" statement.
Thanks.

google

skype kazaa

for yourself, one quick link here,

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/index.php?p=98

I read a more detailed paper someplace else but didn't keep the URL.

If people are foolish enough to think that anything is truly free...

I think some people are losing the point here:

1) Skype isnt free for breaking out to normal phone lines, no, which is pretty useless for calling the guy next door, but for speaking to someone in another country, its often cheaper than standard call rates!

2) The article mentioned above is about installing Kazza, it just so happens that Skype comes bundled with Kazza these days. When was the last time someone installed Kazza on their Mac? Why mention an article about installing kazza on a Windows machine? So Skype comes bundled, thats like me asking about about installing Excel on my mac, and saying that Word for the PC is vulnerable to a buffer overflow... totally unrelated!

If your THAT worried about Spyware on your mac, then get Little Snitch.

3) I've been using Skype on my Mac, and Windows box (at work) for a hell of a long time, usually to keep in touch with friends who have gone travelling, or to call people when Im out and about.... It saves me a small fortune, and I havent had a single issue with SpyWare, and i doubt i will....!

downloaded skype a couple of weeks ago just to try it, thinking it would just be a toy, but have found my self promoting it to all my mac friends and forcing all my pc 'people' to buy microphones! not only is it a pleasurable neat interface, i think the conectivity bitrate and sound quality is far superior to what you get on ichat, i use msn messenger regularly and have now adopted skype in a similar way,
example i had a skype call from my friend on the other end of town, regarding me cooking him dinner that evening, we are both using isubs/soundsticks for the call, i conducted half the call with my head in the freezer in another room listing its contents, in no more volume than i would project if he was there in the flesh, he heard me fine, and the sound quality was such that it sounded like he was actually in the next room.
so i say a hip hip hoorah for apples in built mic's and skype and isub.

if its not a private call, by all means skype it, hands free is what we do nowadays, it has made my mind up to get isight. i wasnt going to "because nobody else has it"! but with that attitude....., i think that we already have the future we saw in films 10-15 years ago, we sometimes dont notice it.

other fave skype moment, after i installed it, i rang every mac in the house, got close to the mic' and let my omnipresent evil voice anounce to the cats that there was no escape, the echo,gain and reverb (which is aplaudibly easy to sort and control within skype) was damned cool, all that was missing was patrick mcgoohan.

xxx

1
You want to look into real VoIP using SIP, IAX or H323.

2
As you might have volontarily ignored, I had no more appropriate link handy. However, anybody in his right mind would probably be well advised to think at least twice before installing it given the fishy background of the people running it. And your example about Excel being less broken than Word... I'll let the readers appreciate...

3
You are entirely free to completely ignore my advice as long as you don't try to convince other people that Skype is a Good Thing, happily ignoring strong arguments against it.

If you want to inform you about "real, standards-based VoIP", take a look at

http://voip-info.org/

There is also a very insightful article linked from their entry about Skype

http://www.voipdaily.com/archives/20...kype_is_no.php

I know very little about Skype and nothing about the people running it. If you make piscine allusions about people, please provide something to back it up.

Maybe you would like to supply at least a summary of these "strong arguments"?

I'm not sure, but I think you are missing the point. Normal users do not care about scalability or standards conformance as long as it works for them. If it stops working at some point, they will drop it and go on to whatever is available and works at that moment. Of course, the above is largely predicated on the app being free (as in beer). "Free" trumps almost everything for most people.

If not for "normal people", I wouldn't bother to post.
Then again, I am just suggesting to do independant resarch on how kazaa and skype are related.
The people I hang out with either have real IP-phones or run Asterisk.

As for the arguments:

1
The protocol is not free.
SIP, IAX, H323 are.
Free as both in speech and beer.

2
Shadiness of initiators related to kazaa.

But as much as I am not trying to actively convert people from other platforms, I am just pointing out things to take into consideration.

Whoever wants to scare her cats with it should just know that there's more about it, have a look and make an informed decision.

Do not be blinded that for once there is a decent Mac client.
That is not a reliable way to assess it's a Good Thing.

funny how this thread turned into a weird argument.....


having checked those links regarding backround of developers etc.

i think i have totally missed the point!!

i dont see it!

i am using a mac. checked for spyware etc not expecting to find any, and didnt.

why in the right mind would i have kazaa?

why would i care about the developers history? the programme works fine for me, i dont care if he has beefed kids either.

and is it not up to me whether or not i "ignore" your authority in telling my friends it is a good thing that i can talk to them for FREE! (i dont remember the bit where i paid for anything) over the net?


honestly ... lighten up.


xxx

Are they?
Please at least state what you know about them instead of just alluding to things. People are very unlikely to do "independent research" unless they have some motivation to do so.
Again, I know almost nothing about the topic - I am just suggesting that if you post something, you at least be definite about it and supply information to back up your opinions.

I would imagine that a "real IP-phone" might cost money. And my first look at Asterisk's page seems to indicate that it doesn't as yet even have a GUI for OS X. So that puts it out of the running for most people.

As I tried to explain above, most people couldn't care less if the underlying technology was actual black magic and it was programmed by devil-worshippers as long as it works for them. Now you might be trying to suggest that these "devil-worshippers" might be using their proprietary protocol to transmit private information from your Mac, or even to use their proprietary app to take over your machine. If so, you should state these possibilities explicitly instead of merely alluding to some unspecified badness.

for me its simple: i can talk to my friend from high school in vietnam for free and with much better quality than ive ever experienced on ichat. and thats that.

The only point I'm trying to make that one might want to look further than Skype being free (as in beer) for now.

However I am sufficiently lightened up ;) not to come up with a complete and detailed documentation why exactly it is evil.

That shall be the end of the dispute as far as I am concerned.

Inform yourself and decide.

This feels a lot like "open-source and open-standards are good, proprietary is eviiiillll" argument.

I've worked in the IT industry for almost 10 years now, and believe me, users (real people, joe-six pack and all of them) don't give a rat's ass if their applications are using open-standars or proprietary ones. They just care if they work or not, and wether they'll have someone help them (like their neighbor or some friend...) when they encounter some problem (reason why a lot of people use windows without a second thought). Trying to convince people to use something or NOT use something using the "open-source or open-standards" argument does not work.

In this case, Skype simply works. Like the Mac! It simply does what it's supposed to be doing, and it's CHEAP..forget the free part. The great think about skype is that it's dirt-cheap and very practical.

Example:

If I were to subscribe to a "real" VoIP service (using, as you call them "real" VoIP phones, whatever THAT means) it would cost me about US$70/Mo plus a small charge for long distance calls (unlimited local calls are included). Using skype, I pay 10 Euros about every month and my wife gets to speak to her mom in Venezuela for a few cents a minute. Now THAT works. Is it a real VoIP phone? Don't know... (what's a real VoIP phone anyway?). Is it using open standards? Who cares? Did these guys do some evildoing with Kazaa? shame on them.. (consider that some current security advisors all over the world were hackers in a previous life) so I probably don't care either.

If one day Skype decides to increase their fees or cancel the free service people will simply move to some other, cheaper, service.

My $0.02

I like Skype and I make quite a bit of use of it.

I also read the links posted here, but honestly they didn't make a particularly clear case about exactly how using Skype on a Mac will adversely affect me.

Can anyone inform me? Is Skype putting Spyware on my machine? Can this be done with a Mac?

Can it be done? Sure. Just because no one's done it yet doesn't mean it can't be done. Is Skype doing it? Despite all the doom and gloom here, no, there is no spyware with Skype.

Of course it can. Viruses too. Mac OS X only makes it harder for a virus or spyware to get into your system.

There are countless worms and trojan horses written for any UNIX flavor you can name. So, Mac OS is also vulnerable to these types of attacks. The only thing that really protects us is the really low market share Apple has on the desktop. For some reason (some say it's not as fun to hack 2% of desktop market share, some say it is because hacking 2% of the desktop market share doesn't get you noticed...), virus, worms and spyware authors have not targeted the mac. The day one does, however, buckle up and start getting as paranoid as our windows-using friends.

Skype is amazing. Download it and use it in the two ways it was meant to be used:

1. talking to others who have installed Skype on their computers (Mac and PC). FREE. The sound quality can be better than any phone conversation (or iChat) that I've ever had, and I spend my day on the phone.

2. call most any phone in the world for just under 2¢ US per minute.

There may be many other programs out there that do this equally as well, or even better. Great, I don't care. Skype is stable, an easy interface, cross-platform and I still get a visceral thrill every time I talk to my web designer, this guy living in a small apartment outside of New Delhi (who I found on Craigslist). It's clearer than any phone conversation. I hear every nuance.

As for the comments about "backgrounds of the designers"... I say people worry too much. Truly. They worry too much about stuff that doesn't matter.

As for it being a close proprietary system... I don't care if it's closed or open or half open or even sideways. It's free, or at 2¢/minute, really close to free.

Just as a complement to the "it simply works"-argument:

http://www.skype.com/security/skype-sb-2005-02.html
http://www.skype.com/security/skype-sb-2005-03.html

Skype client software can be crashed over the network on Linux, Mac OS X and that other OS I constantly forget about.
Heap overflow occurs, there are no known exploits to execute code as of toaday, so it just crashes.

We're gonna see a lot more sec-trouble with VoIP and obviously, open, standard-based systems will be easier to check and fix.

SkypeOut is free!
 

SkypeOut is free to 800 phone numbers.

You can easily use this as a work-around to make a phone call in the USA, just dial 800.373.3411 (information with ads) and have the call directly connected!

Jacques

I tried Skype a number of years ago but sort of wrote it off and hadn't looked into it until I started hearing a buzz about it again - including some refrences in Macworld. I'm getting pretty fed up with Verizon's (my sole phone resource for the past two years) overpriced paltry offerings and will be moving into an establishment with broadband internet soon. This means that some sort of VoIP set up would be a very cost-effective as well as practical application for me.

I am looking for other's suggestions as to ways that I could still have a physical telephone that would then connect to my machine and be used with some sort of VoIP technology. I've also heard rumor of WiFi mobile phones. Any information about either of these tech's would be greatly appreciated. I'll be doing some research on it myself and will post any pertinent data I find back into the thread.

-edit

Well with a little Googling I'm finding that getting an RJ/11 to USB adapter with which to connect a regular telephone to your computer is as easy as searching eBay and dropping $25. The WiFi phone situation also looks pretty interesting. These setups seem to be similar to cellphone packages in which you pay a per/month charge and can then use your wifi phone on any open wifi network.

Are there any experts around here would could provide more information regarding wifi phones used solely on a home network. Is it possible to set up your own "VoIP server" (pardon if this isn't a 1337 term) so that you wouldn't have to use a wifi phone provider.

I use Skype often for international calls, cheap. The audio has definitely improved on my end, over the past few months.

---

It's quality is notable different than iChat.

iChat I find is consistant and clean, but low and muffled a bit. You can barely hear anything except the voice itself. The high ends seem to be all cut off, due to their efficient compression scheme.

Skype has audio artifacts and distortion, but it is much louder and crisper - and you can hear ALL that the mic picks up in the room.

Another funny thing, you can actually call the same person - on BOTH clients at the very same time! They blend pretty well when done, but it's not the best. It's a good way to switch back and forth to check which better suites you though.

---

Skype to Skype works very well and is instant - I've called China a few times, no problems or delays at all. In the regard of client to client, Skype definitely has one distinct advantage - it works regardless of platform. iChat is only Mac to Mac - and the sad reality still stands, there are too many Wintel boxes out there.

---

I've given up on landlines. I use my cell nearly exclusively, then Skype for international phone calls - or when I run low in minutes. Works good for me and family!

Jacques

im a big fan of skype as well i bought some skypeout minutes it works really well even on my ibook g3. i hope we get the video conferencing abilities that the PC version has. i know ichat has it but i want it with skype as well.

Skype is great! I hear voldenuit doing a lot of complaining but i don't recall reading what service (and I don't mean technologies) he would recommend.

I wanted a soft phone feature for my mac. Vonage offered me $25/month (not bad) + $10 for the softphone feature so it would be at least $35/month. This didn't include a setup fee. I looked into other, smaller VoIP companies but the prices were comparable.

The basic Skype can do what AIM, iChat and others can do, except it markets its audio features and not it's text features. Though, the real diference is the incoming and outgoing phone service, which is why I love it. $.02USD/min for an outgoing call for SkypeOUT and $30USD/year for a phone number for SkypeIN. Who can come close to beating that?

I spend in a year what Vonage wants to charge me for just over a month.

I can't speak for the other OSs, but their Mac app is excellent.

Also, I don't know which of these VoIP technologies is best but i really don't care either. I'm not an elitist, so a few K/sec saved isn't going to affect my life.

The funny thing is to read it on a minority platform forum. The problem with something like skype (which works and is all the practical things everybody says around here), interoperability disappears. It's up to ebay whether we are part of it. Had it not been for the background efforts of techies trying to keep things interoperable, there is a lot of things than us Mac users wouldn't be able to do to its full extent, like post on the Net. You'd have to use Windows. That's not happening because some people are working on it by doing things like Mozilla, Safari and its konkeror engine.

interoperability is not to be taken for granted :


http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=48569

If Apple doesn't manage to carve out a bigger market share, Skype might just stop OSX development and concentrate on Vista and XP. That won't be a problem if skype has not marginalised open standards VOIP technologies...

I hope they do the video for OSX. My familly and all my close friends are abroad so that matters to me a lot.

The short answer: It's FREE service is no different from AIM, iChat, Y!, etc. You only pay when you want to send or recieve from a TelCo. This is because it has to leave the internet and connect to PBX telephone system.

Personally, I'm an American and don't know another living soul on Skype. I use iChat to connect ot all my iChat/AIM folk. I use Skype to send/recieve calls next to nothing.

America is only 1/8th of Skype's customers, while eBay's customers are mostly American. $2.6 Billion USD seems quite high but maybe the purchase is not as dumb as I first thought.

Skype and Intel cut exclusive deal leaving AMD out in the cold
 

Skype will enforce artificial limits on their software when it doesn't run on a DualCore Intel chip:

http://news.com.com/When+Intel+calls...96.html?tag=nl

That is the kind of abusive business deal that really makes me vomit...

I don't have a problem with it. This info makes me think that they actually worked together to optimize Skype for the processor instead of some back alley dealing...

"Intel approached Skype with its plan to optimize code on its chips for Skype's software so users would have a good experience while hosting a multiperson conference call, Crooke said.
...
The 10-way calling feature will be exclusive to Intel's chips for a limited time, Gomez said. Skype is not releasing the time frame for the expiration of the exclusive agreement, he said."

Skype - 10 minute gift
 

A bit off topic, but of note - if you go to your Skype account TODAY (2/14), click on the 'free 10 minutes' gift there to add to your account.

Jacques

Thanks Jacques! I rarely log into the webpage. I wouldn't have known of it otherwise.

perhaps a bit off-topic, but I've been using mainly gizmo project (don't ask me why, it just looks nice and I kinda felt like skype was going more and more commercial, not that I mind about that, but I just wanted to keep an eye on other products that do the same...so I ended up using gizmo now).
It has a very nice interface, works like a charm, isn't much better or worse then skype though..just personal taste I guess..but if you're interested just give it a try.
http://www.gizmoproject.com/

just some extra info from wikipedia:

Since the Gizmo Project is based on SIP, it can interoperate with other SIP-based networks directly. This includes the popular PBX program Asterisk, the Earthlink service, and Gnome Phone. This avoids the phone system and is thus free of charge.
The Gizmo Project software also has features that Skype lacks, or offers add an additional fee. Built-in recording, free voicemail, and the previously mentioned interoperability are the main advantages that Gizmo has over Skype.

(with most of my good friends I now just use ventrillo because it's just easier and all of us are online most of the time anyway).

laters.