A month without skype

You may remember from last month that I did not renew my SkypeOut account, which is $3/month for (practically) unlimited calls to the US.

I went with a company that uses the open/standard VOIP platform called SIP for PC-to-phone connections. Using SIP instead of some proprietary protocol means you can choose your own client (the softphone) and do all kinds of complex multi-service configurations if you want. The client I used was Ekiga.

So here's my take after 1 month. I have switched to Twinkle, a simpler client than Ekiga. The SIP-based VOIP works and sounds great.


Cost analysis
I spent $0.15 on my diamondcard SIP account in the last month. That same cost on Skype would have been $3.00, a factor of 20x.

Barefoot: living with no landline

It's been 1.5 yrs since I've last had a landline, and I don't miss it at all. I don't even think about it. Sometimes the neighbors come over and say "is your telephone line dead?" and I hold up the cell and say "nope".

I do most things on a T-Mo cellphone. For long conversations that one would usually do on a landline I have been using Skype (SkypeOut, $36/yr). Since my subscription expires in a couple of days I've been sniffing around to see if there are any better fits out there:

1. Skype is not open source, and my workstations are linux. Skype software for linux lags behind Windoze versions and is too bloated/cutesy for my taste.
2. I don't use many minutes, so a by-the-minute deal is probably cheaper for me than a flatrate monthly deal.

Skype uses a proprietary, closed network, but most of the rest of the VOiP world communicates using the SIP protocol.

The best-known SIP client is ekiga, originally a student project designed for Gnome, one of the Big Two linux integrated desktop environments. The clients talk to each other using a SIP provider, a kind of matchmaker. Calls are free from pc-to-pc. There are commercial SIP providers that offer PC-to-phone calling (outbound), which is what I was buying from skype.

The commercial SIP provider I picked was Diamondcard. The cost per minute to the US/Canada is $0.016 (ie, 1.6c/minute). This means if I talk more than 188 minutes a month on Diamondcard it will cost less than Skype. If I talk more than that it would be cheaper to use skype. Should be an interesting experiment.

188 mins doesn't seem like much, does it? But my cell is my main point of contact and I use it about 90mins / month. They don't even make plans that low. I have no idea how people burn through 1000s of mins each month.

Landline

It appears we are joining the crowd of folks who do not have a landline in the house. Before we moved the phone sat there and kept the answering machine company.

Every once in a while we'd get phonecalls from telemarketers but that was about it. Both the wife and I carry cellphones everywhere and generally only call each other. So when we are at home no one is calling anyone. Even then I only had a landline because at that time it was difficult to get a naked DSL circuit.

So now I'm running TW cable broadband through a tasty-hacked WRT54GL linux-based router running OpenWRT. Functional Quality of Service manipulation in a $50 router. Awesome and geeky. Awesomely geeky. Which I've tuned for VoIP.

Which brings me to the current topic. I'm a latecomer to Skype, but it loaded and runs fine on my 1ghz linux box. I sprung the $3 for the upgraded version that lets you call US/Canada numbers for free. Neat.

Since the Dear Wife luvs her some old-style phones, I ordered a box off Amazon that appears to let you jack a normal phone into your Skype feed. I've got a cordless phone that we'll press back into duty. I'll let you know how it goes.