In the world of software, few new releases are met with universal praise. If 95 percent of software releases are designed for Windows, Mac heads and Linux lovers like to say that about the same number will have problems. This is with run-of-the-mill, work-a-day software, mind you. If it's something groundbreaking -- say an Internet telephony solution -- downloading the beta version would be like asking for the plague.
But after a company called Skype released its eponymous P2P telephony software, the geek world's pronouncement was that "it works." Given the prospect of never paying another long distance bill, those two words were enough to convince a million of the rest of us to give it a try.
And you know what? It works. What's more, it's free!
For those who haven't answered the clue phone, Internet telephony (ITP) is simply making telephone calls over the Internet regardless of whether you're using traditional telephones or a PC and regardless whether the calls are entirely transmitted over the Internet or only partially.
Voice-over-IP, or VoIP, has been around for a few years now, offered with Web-chat programs such as Microsoft's NetMeeting or Yahoo Messenger, which have grown in popularity and sophistication. But using those programs to place phone calls requires a bit of sophistication on the part of the user and more than a bit of patience.
There has been little quality to the sound and users usually have to take turns s-p-e-a-k-i-n-g c-l-e-a-r-l-y or risk having whole parts of sentences be lost to silence. "Sorry, what did you say?" "No, no, you were talking" is how most calls placed over Messenger or NetMeeting sound.
Part of the reason may be that these programs often employ the use of Web cameras, forcing the machines at both ends to pack and unpack for both video and audio, slowing even the fastest machines. If you were crossing platforms, from PC to Mac or Linux, you were essentially waiting for the application to bomb. Skype eschews Webcams for the promise of clear and natural-sounding voice communication.
The company was founded last year by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, better known as the men behind KaZaA. They modeled Skype on the same peer-to-peer technology that millions of Netizens around the world have used to trade songs and movies.
As with KaZaA, each new Skype user adds computer power to the network. For placing telephone calls computer-to-computer, this has the effect of decentralizing the traditional client-server network and skipping past switchboards.
Skype claims to have succeeded by leveraging all the power of networks and by routing calls through the most effective path possible, thereby reducing latency. Where additional users to a traditional telephone switchboard weigh down the system, more Skype users mean more paths through which your call can be routed.
There have been dedicated telephony devices created in recent years that do this same thing. Anyone out there calling Mom on an AplioPhone? Didn't think so. There are likely more people still listening to 8-tracks than there are using AplioPhones. One of its great drawbacks is that it works best when you're calling another AplioPhone. Try dialing to a regular telephone and the results are as sketchy as with Messenger or NetMeeting.
Skype will allow you to place calls from your PC to a regular telephone but, as with other companies that offer a similar service, such as iConnect, you must go through a gateway that will route your call through the Public Switched Telephone Network to a regular phone.
RSS