has anyone tried this progrom yet? i am very curious about it, especially since it is endorsed by ebay.

http://www.skype.com/

9/18/2005 12:17:03 PM

it's endorsed by eBay b/c it was bought by eBay

I haven't tried it personally, but have been told it works well and I should give it a shot esp w/ online gaming

[Edited on September 18, 2005 at 12:34 PM. Reason : ---]

9/18/2005 12:30:48 PM

I tried it. Mixed results. The quality depends quite a bit on who lucky you are.

9/18/2005 1:05:45 PM

Could you explain that quality/lucky part?

9/18/2005 1:06:31 PM

I've used it for conferencing and the sound quality was way better than my cell phone. There seemed to be a second or two delay so it was weird hearing people laugh at a joke 4 seconds after the punchline. We did have trouble at times getting re-connected after getting disconnected, but this actually didn't happen as often as my cell phone cuts out on me, plus it was among 4 people across different platforms (Mac and PC's). Going over a wireless network didn't seem to affect the quality at all.

9/18/2005 4:05:26 PM

I've used Skype to call all over the place from the guy next to me in class to Sweden and Japan, and the quality ranged from pristine-I-could-hear-squirrels-gnawing-on-nuts-2-blocks-away to yelling-through-mud. Most of the time it was awesome though. And keep in mind the quality is LARGEY determined by the devices on either end of the call, i.e. your speakers and mike, and either their speakers-and-mike or their phone. A computer-to-computer call with good equipment is going to sound like heaven (unless there's network lag), but calling a cellphone on a busy street on the other side of the world is going to be difficult to discern if there's any network delay.

I'm highly impressed with SkypeOut (paying peanuts to call an actual telephone number, usually 2-14 eurocents/minute, the higher end being cellphones in foreign countries). I'm eager to try some of the SkypeOut forwarding applications out there, in which someone far away at their computer calls your computer, which then uses SkypeOut to call your cellphone at the US rate of ~1.3 eurocents/minute.

But to expound on the quality/lucky part of the equation, Skype works on p2p technology, so how your call gets routed depends largely on the positioning of the stars and the day of the week. Millions use it concurrently though, so you should expect good results most of the time.

9/18/2005 10:09:13 PM