As of today, free skype out to Canada & US

[Jason Spiro]

On 5/17/06, Andrew Hammond <ahammond-swQf4SbcV9C7WVzo/KQ3Mw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Personally, the effect that I've observed for this is that both my
> Mom and Sister have signed up and bought Skype credit. That appears
> to be necessary to enable SkypeOut. I could be wrong, but either way
> it seems right to put a little bit of money their way for the
> service, and a one-time $14CDN payment for unlimited long-distance
> seems a good bargain. Neither of them is particularly technologically
> adept, but they've both decided to use Skype for all their long-
> distance calls from now on.

If you are only calling within Canada and the U.S. you do not have to
sign up for the SkypeOut service at all. Just enter +1-416-123-4567 in
the dial bar at the bottom, then click the big green Call button right
below it. You must type a + sign and a 1 before the number.

The point of paying money is to get cheap long distance elsewhere, or
to get an incoming line, although you're better off with a company
that lets you connect with a SIP or IAX client as was mentioned
earlier. If I recall correctly IAX tunnels through firewalls better
than SIP but less hardware VoIP phones support it.

There are some Toronto VoIP providers listed at
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Cheapest+ATAs+and+Service - does
anyone have any experience with using any of these or any others?
How's the convenience, reliability, sound quality, and customer
service?

Brandon:
> On 17-May-06, at 08:16, Brandon Sandrowicz wrote:
>
> > it's not like another SIP-based
> > client couldn't add XMPP and libjingle support to interoperate with
> > GTalk, unlike Skype.

Yes, they could, but nobody has yet. :) Gaim's voice and video
integration efforts are going far slower than expected. Somebody made
a psi-jingle (Google voice-activated) fork of the Psi Jabber instant
messaging client, but that fork is only alpha-quality and hasn't been
worked on for months IIRC. Sad but true. If only somebody set up a
bounty to get this stuff added to Gaim and Kopete.

Cheers,
Jason
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