Skype VOIP : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

A free VOIP computer-to-computer Internet voice and video phone service. For extra charge, but still below the cost of long distance you can also call conventional land line phones. That service is called skypeout. For an extra charge, you can have a traditional phone number that follows you around the planet. That service is called skypein. It looks to your callers like a traditional land line in the USA. You can’t use it for 911 emergency service. It works with a microphone, your PC (Personal Computer) sound card and screen.

You can embed a Skype number in your HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) like this:

When the user clicks the link, it will set up a Skype call, providing the association between callto and Skype is intact.

Advantages

Very cheap, flat rate, long distance both to other Skype users and people in North America with ordinary phone service.
If both ends have high speed Internet connections and decent software, such as the Apple iPad Skype, the voice is very clear without cutous and the visuals are smooth too.

Disadvantages

With poor Internet connections, the voice quality is pretty bad, like long distance back in the 1950s. It is a bit like someone talking down a vacuum cleaner hose. It find it both depressing and amusing that digital telephones give worse voice quality, have more cutouts, and take longer to set up calls that the primitive analog phones of Alexander Graham Bell’s day.
When someone calls a regular phone with Skype, the callee hears his own voice echoing back in short bursts. This is quite distracting. It sounds as if the callee is trying to interrupt.
If the Internet is busy, there are frequent cutouts.
When the callee is talking, Skype cuts off the caller’s background sounds, so it feels to the caller like talking to dead air.

Ooma
Primus
VOIP
Vonage

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