With all my travelling around the world, it is important
to keep in contact, but telephoning is too expensive, especially mobile
phones.
I have for sometime used the Internet Telephony service
of Skype, what is called VoIP (Voice over Internet). Many of my family,
friends and colleagues have taken this free service (yes free), and we
can communicate at ease.
Skype
Technologies S.A. provides an international online communication
service. It is 2 years old and has 50 million registered users. The
company is the fastest growing and largest of its kind with 150,000 new
people joining every day. We’d like to do for telephones what e-mail
did to the post.
Skype is a
small piece of software that you can download from the Internet for
free. If you have a broadband connection, you can call between two
computers anywhere in the world. You can also conference up to 5
participants, send instant messages and share files. Voicemail will
record a message for you if can’t take the call, and allows you to send
voice messages between users. What’s really cool about Skype is that
you can also call almost any number in the standard telephone network,
receive calls from normal telephones and forward calls to up to 3
different numbers when you are away from your computer.
What can’t
Skype do?
·
Skype cannot make emergency (911, 999, 112, 211) calls
·
Make the tea
People use
Skype to stay in touch in ways that they haven’t been able to before.
They can talk to each other for hours free of charge (even though they
may be thousands of miles apart). They can carry their landline number
and check their voicemail wherever they go, and avoid roaming charges.
Skype is also ideal for staying in touch where the telephone
infrastructure is poor.
There are a
lot of services out there that do a similar thing. We believe that
Skype is different because it has the best call quality and works
behind any computer firewall without any setting up. Your calls and
chats are totally private because they are encrypted. You can make
calls to any telephone and any computer, whether it is PC, Mac, Linux
or PocketPC.
Please send your
comments to Phillip Holt NLPNOW.
This document was updated 21/4/2012.