VOIP system design, need recommendation

[PandaBear]

Just got rid of the last relic called land line. This 100 year old technology has served us good, but is getting too expensive even if we do not use it for long distance call. The number has been ported to a cell phone in my family (mom) and for $85 before tax, we got 550 minutes air time with AT&T, unlimited nights and weekend, and mobile to mobile, and roll over reserve of about 1700 minutes so far. That's a $108 per month to take care of all 5 lines after tax.

Now to reduce cell minutes usage I'm thinking about installing a skype phone at home and in my relative's home in China. We have a niece here that calls her mom/dad on a regular basis and currently we are burning through calling cards. I figure if we are going through DSL or cable modem on both sides, VOIP should be a good choice.

Any recommendation on how to implement it? Anyone tried calling Skype to Skype from China and US? How's the quality?

 

[Boatingnut]

I have Skyped to all parts of Asia, Europe and Australia. Works fine, as long as the connections are good.

 

[Quest]

Skyping between Asia countries and NA is great way to save money, so long as the latency is not too bad nor significant packet loss.

Good luck on that.

Q.

 

[Ndx]

check... future-nine.com

dslreports.com/voip

Owner of the F9 - Nitzan is a great guy !

Im In Canada im used F9 to replace my land line !
Quality as good as land line .. using my home phones
with Linksys ATA .... Easy, Cheap Reliable

Cheers,
N

 

[uc50ic4more]

I conversed, via Skype - web cam + audio, with occasional file transfers and chat - a lot from here in Canada to a friend who was teaching golf in China for a year. It was like he was around the corner. The caveat, of course and as always, is that things are entirely dependent of the internet connection(s) on the parties.

My family, too, has done away with our land line, although we keep a cell phone around for incoming calls, as Skype does not - or, according to them, can not issue Canadian phone numbers.

I use it on my Macbook Pro, my wife and several friends, family, neighbours and clients use it on Ubuntu systems I've built for them, and I conduct video conferences with 3 others who use the Windows version from time to time. Apart from a few hiccups with web cam drivers in Ubuntu, there's been nary a complaint.

It should be noted that lots of instant messaging programs have audio and even video functionality; Skype offers three huge benefits, though: 1) better integrations with phones, 2) better cross-platform/ OS support than a lot of others, and 3) much, much better performance behind firewalls.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
I conversed, via Skype - web cam + audio, with occasional file transfers and chat - a lot from here in Canada to a friend who was teaching golf in China for a year. It was like he was around the corner. The caveat, of course and as always, is that things are entirely dependent of the internet connection(s) on the parties.


Does your friend in China have to do a Lion Dance around the Great Firewall of China (aka the Internet police, censor, or blockade around some protocol)? I read a few years ago when TOM and Skype found a joint venture in China for VOIP, they were blocked left and right.

The news I read was from 2005, and I'm sure things are different now.

 

[uc50ic4more]

Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Does your friend in China have to do a Lion Dance around the Great Firewall of China


He was there for year, from '05 - '06. I was personally shocked that the evil commies weren't looking over his shoulder, but he had nothing but great things to say about the place and the people. He was about 100km north of Hong Kong.

I had even typed things like "democracy" and "freedom" in our text chats just to see if he'd be detained and tortured. As a running joke, I will still type things into a MSN chat like "Next weekend we should assassinate the President of the United States" just to see if the feds ever swoop down on him and take him to Gitmo. I fear the Chinese government a heck of a lot less than the U.S. government.

I don't really follow closed-source stuff too very much, but I am pretty sure that Skype communications are encrypted. If there was any kind of trouble, I would have insisted that we move to a different, but still encrypted technology, or move offline and encrypt everything with GPG.

 

[uc50ic4more]

Coincidentally, I just caught this story on the wire:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s...14.wgtskype0414

Apparently, Skype had been an utterly disastrous purchase for eBay.