free calls via skype

May 16th, 2006


Sure, I’m not the sharpest tool in the drawer — but I’m not dumb as paint either, and it still took me a couple tries to figure out how to make a regular “old-school” phone call via Skype. It works like this:

  1. Download Skype.
  2. Run through the setup wizard.
  3. Format your outgoing number like this: plus sign, 1, area code, then the phone number (dashes are optional), then hit “Call”:

…and prestoli, free phone call! I’m not entirely convinced Skype is the way to go (vs. other, more open SIP-based voice-over-IP providers) but they do currently have the slickest VoIP software implementation, and their latest announcement of free outgoing calls to the US* sure makes hardware like this outrageously expensive Netgear/Skype wifi phone more attractive.

~jeff

* Here’s my theory why Skype is doing this: they have a non-standard voice-over-IP protocol, and they want enough of an installed use base up and running before other SIP software packages (I’m looking at you, Gizmo Project and Ekiga) get slicker and other SIP hardware options come to market. They want to be the AOL of the VoIP market.



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  • Carrie

    As Jeff knows, we use Skype from our house, badly, because we don’t have any sort of fancy phone gizmo hooked up to it, just the Playstation Socom headset — and the sound is pretty craptastic. I actually lost an editing job to the lack of sound coming out of my phone.

    However, using Skype as our home phone is cheap, much cheaper than paying a local and long distance company for the priveledge of a dial tone and minutes on top of that, and they aren’t monopoly-utilizing bastards like most phone companies. Mostly the software does its job (though it occasionally chokes if Illustrator, Photoshop, and a billion webpages are all blazing away at once). Only drawbacks: sometimes it’s hard to coordinate one person reading webpages while the other is on a call, no 911, no state-specific 800 numbers. Suffice to say, I’m pro-Skype after this 6-month tryout.

  • http://nvranver.com anver

    pls send me trick