Phone companies must really hate the Internet.
I mean, we will be away from home for about a year, and we intend to keep in regular contact with people back home, so that's potentially a lot of income for them. Donna talks to her mum at least every day and she loves a chat, so if we had to pay for international phone calls we'd go broke. When Dave and I first started corresponding we used MSN Messenger, which I think has evolved into a fairly remarkable little piece of software. Dave never had it installed, and later admitted that it was because he was always under the impression that Messenger was just something that teenage kids used to waste time online. I convinced him to install it, and I think he's changed his opinion somewhat. The instant chat option is just the tip of the iceberg, and once you start to get the hang of Messenger's full functionality... being able to exchange files, as well as all the audio and video capabilities, it's a pretty powerful tool. We've spent quite a bit of time using the audio chat, which to all intents and purposes has been as good as a phone call. I've streamed video over to him, although it's a bit one sided so far till he gets his webcam... but the ability to click a button and send video is pretty cool.
And then I recently got reacquainted with Skype. I tried Skype a while ago, and although the concept seemed good, at the time it didn't appear to do much more than what I was doing with Messenger - in fact it seemed to do less, as it didn't support video. But with the upcoming trip to Canada, and the need to be making lots of actual telephone calls to our families back at home who are not all that computer savvy, we could see the potential in Skype's SkypeOut feature which lets you call directly from your computer to a regular telephone. Also, I guess because Skype is purely a VoIP telephony application it does seem to have a slightly better voice call quality than Messenger. Let's face it, my 93 year old Nan is not going to set up an MSN account to let me chat to her, but she will answer her telephone! So with Skype we can call our family and friends back in Australia, directly from our PC to their telephones, for about 2 cents a minute!
That should make us very popular with our families, and decidely unpopular with the telephone companies. :-)
I mean, we will be away from home for about a year, and we intend to keep in regular contact with people back home, so that's potentially a lot of income for them. Donna talks to her mum at least every day and she loves a chat, so if we had to pay for international phone calls we'd go broke. When Dave and I first started corresponding we used MSN Messenger, which I think has evolved into a fairly remarkable little piece of software. Dave never had it installed, and later admitted that it was because he was always under the impression that Messenger was just something that teenage kids used to waste time online. I convinced him to install it, and I think he's changed his opinion somewhat. The instant chat option is just the tip of the iceberg, and once you start to get the hang of Messenger's full functionality... being able to exchange files, as well as all the audio and video capabilities, it's a pretty powerful tool. We've spent quite a bit of time using the audio chat, which to all intents and purposes has been as good as a phone call. I've streamed video over to him, although it's a bit one sided so far till he gets his webcam... but the ability to click a button and send video is pretty cool.
And then I recently got reacquainted with Skype. I tried Skype a while ago, and although the concept seemed good, at the time it didn't appear to do much more than what I was doing with Messenger - in fact it seemed to do less, as it didn't support video. But with the upcoming trip to Canada, and the need to be making lots of actual telephone calls to our families back at home who are not all that computer savvy, we could see the potential in Skype's SkypeOut feature which lets you call directly from your computer to a regular telephone. Also, I guess because Skype is purely a VoIP telephony application it does seem to have a slightly better voice call quality than Messenger. Let's face it, my 93 year old Nan is not going to set up an MSN account to let me chat to her, but she will answer her telephone! So with Skype we can call our family and friends back in Australia, directly from our PC to their telephones, for about 2 cents a minute!
That should make us very popular with our families, and decidely unpopular with the telephone companies. :-)
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