Holiday Long Distance, Skype Style

This year I made all my long distance telephone calls to family and friends with SkypeOut. Here’s the setup:

I’m using my iSight’s microphone and my iPod buds. A better option would have been a decent USB headset, but this is what I had around. It’s more cumbersome than the cordless telephone, but with SkypeOut rates at about 2c/min worldwide the additional cludgery was well worth it! The PowerBook is connected to the Net via WiFi from a crappy SMC router. I had one dropped call and several times the conversation went half-duplex with my outbound audio stream vanishing completely. Could have been the crappy router (which needs a reboot every few days in the best of conditions) or occasionally spotty WiFi signal. Or just Skype screwing up. I never bothered to debug it since it worked well enough most of the time. Is this the future? I dunno. Quality and convenience on the good old telephone line is nice. If anything these services should keep putting more price pressure on the telcos, and that’s good news.

I’ll try to remember to compare this year’s setup with next years!