Tag: VoIP

Skype 1.5 for Mac OS X allows you to make video calls. It’s about time.

On Monday, Skype announced that all SkypeOut calls originating from the US and Canada made to any phone in the US and Canada are free until December 31, 2006. Of course, I had to try it out right away. Wade made a SkypeOut call from Edmonton to my home phone. It sounded great. No noticeable compression or latency.

Out of curiosity, I checked out how much it would cost me to get a phone number and voicemail through Skype. €30 (about $38.50) for a twelve month subscription. This was shocking.

For comparable service (free calls to anywhere in the US and Canada) from Verizon, I pay about $80 per month. $960 per year. $920 more than I need to pay. Incredibly wasteful.

Even if Skype decides to start charging again for SkypeOut calls to the US and Canada, I highly doubt I’d rack up $920 in calls in one year. I would have to spend almost 639 hours (more than 26 days) in outgoing calls.

As far as I can tell, the only downside to switching to Skype is losing the ability to call 911. Is there anything I’m missing here?

Recently, I’ve been reading about Gizmo, a VOIP application that is obviously intended to go head-to-head with Skype. I was curious about how they compared, so today I gave it a try. The first thing I noticed was that Gizmo is very well organized. All of the important information is available in the main view.

A couple minutes after installation, I received a notification that I had been credited $0.25 toward their CallOut service. Very smart. I immediately called Jenn at work to see how it sounded. It was quite clear, with minimal compression artifacts and no noticeable latency. Their pricing is a bit lower than Skype’s.

A little later, I convinced Wade to download it so we could try a computer-to-computer call. The latency was still very low. However, the compression was much more obvious this time. Skype is clearly better for computer-to-computer calls.

Conference calling is admittedly lacking in this release of Gizmo. In order to set one up, you need to have everyone call the same number in the 212 area code. Built-in conferencing is promised in a future release.

IM and file transfer also appear to be missing. These aren’t such a big deal, because most already use a service that allows for these. However, it would be nice to see these in Gizmo.

Overall, Gizmo is very impressive. With some work, I think they’re going to be giving Skype a run for their money.