Hello, Hello, Hello?

At last, I took the plunge and tapped in my credit card details for Skype. You may have read an earlier post of mine about my adventures in VOIP. Of course, it's not the free solution, but it started off as free and now I'm willing to pay a bit for convenience.

I could pay another little bit more for even more convenience and just pick up a normal phone but after our last bill, even Tele-2 seems expensive.

Read moreI read about free SkypeOut days where they give away 10 minutes worth of free calling. It's always free for PC-to-PC calls but you have to cough up if you want to call proper phones. I was lucky enough to grab myself 10 minutes of free phone time and used it in true extra-terrestial fasion to call home.

Calling was a piece of cake and from my side the voice quality was just like a normal phone, though perhaps a little muffled and distant. Over in Blighty, I came across like a echoing computer voice but still better than all the other PC-to-PC VOIP experiments.

It was so good, we actually chatted as if in a normal telephone conversation instead of the usual, sorry, can you repeat that, you cut out just then, what did you say?, let's hang up and I'll call you on the proper phone. The call lasted slightly longer than 10 minutes before getting cut off. I was so impressed that I immediately whipped out my hey.. card and charged up my account to the tune of 10 Euros (plus a pesky 1.5 euro tax). At less than 2 Euro cents per minute to the UK, it's quite a saving and should be a while before I have to shell out again.