Internet phones: Kind of scary, kind of cool

I don’t own a landline, and my cell phone gets awful reception in my apartment. I've struggled through it for a year, but yesterday became overly frustrated when I needed to make some calls and my phone refused to cooperate. So, I decided to wade into the new frontier of Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP. I downloaded Skype and registered for free, which was really easy.

Then came the big test: a call.

But who to contact? I don’t actually know anyone with Skype, or anyone who uses VOIP. Skype does have a little feature in which people can open themselves up to random calls -- but amusingly, this exciting new technology is already infested with the same sort of hornbots that make the rest of the Internet so damn creepy. The screencap you see above is from one of the searches I did. In addition to not wanting to provide sex and cock for people like irene_lovely, I was nervous about calling anyone at all. This is all so new and mysterious, and I don't know what's appropriate. I decided it would be least intimidating to randomly call an American 20-something girl -- I'm not really sure why -- but options were narrow because I also wanted to find someone not seeking sex or cock. After a few searches, I finally found a winner: Rebecca in California.

Skype allows you to IM a person, so I sent Rebecca a message saying I wanted to try out the system, had randomly chosen her, and hoped she wouldn't mind if I called her just to see if we could hear each other. She said OK, and 10 seconds later we were talking. Over the computer. For free. On Skype. And my mind was ready to explode.

It’s very, very cool. The sound quality is fine. It was pretty weird to talk to a random person like this, because unlike IM, there was no time to edit. I found myself constantly babbling to fill space, and interrupted myself two or three times to say, "This is so weird." We talked for two or three minutes about Skype, and then had enough. I thanked Rebecca for her time, and disconnected.

It was time for the next challenge: calling people who don’t have Skype.

Skype-to-Skype calls are free, but outside calls to much of the developed world cost $0.017 cents a minute. That means it costs me the same to call down the street as it does to Australia, which is pretty impressive. Users pay in advance, and the lowest amount I could pay was 10 British pounds, or $13 and change. I did it, and then called my dad. He said I sounded clear, although a little tinny. That’s fine with me. I made one or two more calls, and found the whole thing to be really reliable.

Of course, there’s a level of annoyance involved here. To call, I have to be sitting at my computer. Because I don’t have a real microphone, I had to hook up a toy headset and leave it lying next to the computer. I have to wear headphones, because otherwise there’s an echo. Also, Skype users can’t call 911 in an emergency, so it’s not a totally responsible replacement for phones. Still, though, I’m impressed. The calls are cheap, the quality is good, and the convenience factor -- at least as a response to my cell phone problem -- is very high. Thumbs up, Skype. Now, who wants some sex and cock?

Kidding! Oh, how we kid.

Posted by Jason Feifer at October 11, 2005 12:01 AM