Wickham's musings from Chalke

 
A year or so ago a company called Skype www.skype.com introduced a phone service using computers. This wasn’t new because Microsoft Messenger has been doing it for years. However, Skype allowed calls to a normal or mobile phone if PC to PC calls weren’t possible. They charge for PC to phone calls but not PC to PC calls. I got it mainly because calls to normal phones are about half British Telecom’s daytime rate – 1.5p compared to 3p. I’m using my old microphone and it is perfectly OK. Sometimes there is a small echo but this would disappear with a headset.

Almost immediately I was made aware of another service in beta (test) mode called voipbuster www.voipbuster.com which gives free calls to normal phones in UK and between UK and USA, Europe, Canada and Australia and free calls to mobiles in some countries so I am using this for almost all my calls now. I still use BT for 08 and 09 calls and to mobiles as Skype and voipbuster are more expensive for these. Voipbuster may charge once it gets a general release but for the time being it’s worth using.

About three weeks ago a video plugin was released in beta (test) form by Dialcom called Spontania video4skype. It’s completely free and doesn’t need a username or password as it is just an addition to Skype. I got it and so did many others. I’m using my old webcam and the quality of my image is much better than the ones I see from others. There are occasions when it doesn’t connect, usually because someone hasn’t clicked the right button or it wasn’t open when the Skype call was initiated. Lots of people were testing it and reporting problems with audio or video on the Skype forum but by and large it works well. I have recommended it to cousins Jan next door and Margie in Australia but they don’t seem very interested.

Just over a week ago another video plugin www.vskype.com was advertised and the company asked for beta testers. When they had enough they closed to new downloads. On 13th June it was released and many people who had previously been contacting each other with video4skype lost interest in that and started using vskype. There seem to be many more bugs because it is a far more complicated system. I haven’t risked it yet. One of my USA contacts has already uninstalled it and another hasn’t been able to get his microphone to work although we had a video call yesterday alright using video4skype.

Vskype allows eight video screens and two hundred audio calls although only four can speak at any one time. It seems designed for university lecturers to speak to students and he or any of the eight video callers can display from the desktop a powerpoint presentation or anything else instead of their image so that the majority of those in the call are just watching and occasionally speaking. Video4skype is a simple one to one video although Skype allows an audio conference call of five people.

It’s noticeable that the Skype forum is full of Europeans with broken English whereas the vskype forum is dead until evening UK time suggesting that they are mainly from the west coast of USA where it was designed by Santa Cruz Networks. I may get it eventually just to play with but I can’t see myself doing many conference calls. Skype was designed by a Finn and a Dane I believe and video4skype’s Dialcom has offices in Spain, Germany and Portugal.

This is from vskype’s homepage