01.06.06 skypeage

After just a few posts to this thing, I'm noticing a clear desire on my part to post more, even if there's nothing to report. I find myself wanting to tap out the trivia of my day and most recent concerns, even though they are not the point of this blog. Therefore, I will resolve to only post items relevant to my overseas journey, and hopefully let off a little trivia pressure whenever I get enough appropriate material to warrant a post. The tension created between wanting to jabber and not finding noteworthy subjects should make for interesting something or other. We shall see.

On to it: Frank turned me on to this thing called Skype, which is a voice over ip service that runs on your PC, and has the following features:

• totally free calls to anyone using Skype
• 2 cents/minute from Skype to land lines (in the 1st world)
• 25 cents/minute from Skype to cell phones
• local phone numbers wherever you like that forward to your computer wherever you are for $30/year
• forward to a land line or cell at the same rate as calling a land line or cell

...best of all, this all works the same and costs the same, wherever you are in the world.

So, theoretically, I can give my mom a Seattle (206) number to call us at, it will go to my Skype account on my PC, and will cost only 2 cents a minute. This beats the hell out of the 1 POUND a minute I was paying on my crappy "pay as you go" phone that I took on my last few trips to the UK. If I have it forward to my UK cell, it will only cost 25 cents a minute, still about 1/7th the cost I was paying last time. If I can teach her how to use a Skype phone on her computer, it's entirely free!

No matter which way we go, this makes for a dirt cheap way of doing long distance, EXCEPT for the forwarding to cell phone case, which probably wouldn't be super useful anyway, as I don't want to get calls from mom in the middle of class.

I'm going to check it out tonight, Frank even lent me a usb voip phone to try. Maybe this will keep me from going broke via long distance phone when I go over.

Update: the phone works fine, the service works fine (sometimes fades in and out), and the Skype site and online store are kind of crappy. The experience is a bit cooler when you use the microphone and speakers of the computer, except then you have issues with echoes. I'm going to keep working on this, I'd like to not have to spend so damn much money on phones the next time I go over.

L8tr

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