The Truth About Skype
Someone asked me recently if Earth Class Mail was living up to expectations after using them for a month. Honestly the service has been flawless and I am still as thrilled as when I posted the review. However, not everyone can live up to ECM standards.
Skype, on the other hand, has been nothing but heartache. For some, it’s a god send. It’s free to call computers, cheap to call home and is available in most internet cafes abroad. But if you’re serious about your phone communication, just know not everything about Skype works as advertised.
A quick search for “skype sucks” bring up over 4.6 million results. Apparently I’m not the only one.
Call Quality
This has been a hit or miss. Sometimes I sound like I’m in a wind tunnel, other times it’s perfectly clear. If you’ve ever spent some time in an internet cafe overseas, you’re likely to hear this converation as someone tries to call home from their computer. “Hello! Hi Dad, I’m in Spain. Spain. I AM IN SPAAAINNN. Yes, ha ha. I miss you too. I SAID I MISS Y-O-U TOO. What?”
Doing Business
If you are using Skype to call a business contact, there are times when you need to be able to call a conference number, especially if you’re like my husband who attends company meetings via dial-in. It doesn’t work. If it’s an 800 number forget about it. If it’s a local number, then MAYBE it will work.
The Headset
We bought a $125 headset and it makes a big improvement in the sound quality, especially for those on the other end. Without it, calls are impossible. I don’t begrudge having to use one, but if you’re thinking Skype will be cheaper than a cell phone, you should factor this cost in. (By the way, my cheapo $20 headset is useless, so there are levels of quality in the headset game).
Lack of Local Numbers
If you want someone to be able to call you from a regular phone, you must buy a phone number. This is a great service and what initially attracted us to Skype. However, once we got to pick our number (after having already paid) there were limits on what countries you use. We live in Spain. Could we get a Spanish number? Nope. It was the UK for us, and while there were numbers in many other European countries, Spain just wasn’t available.
Random Errors
Sometimes my husband can’t dial a number. He presses the keys and they register each number twice. Other times it doesn’t register at all. Imagine having an important call and sweating over trying to get the number in? Why does it do this? No idea. It’s possible this would never happen to you. But when you’re staring down a 2 PM deadline and you can’t call your client, then suddenly the cheap fees just aren’t worth it.
Your best bet
If you’re living somewhere for an extended period of time or traveling around a single continent (like Europe), buying a prepaid cell phone is still cheaper, easier and more practical. Even when I’m traveling to different countries the reception is still better than Skype. If you want to call home on your computer, you can still use the free service, but if you need quality, reliable service, I’m afraid Skype has a long way to go.
What has your experience been like?
We chose to get a fixed local SkypeIn phone number in the States. This allows companies and family in the States to call a “non-scary” US number instead of a dreaded international number. Given the changing time zones we’ve been through, this has worked really well. It allows people to leave a message and we can call back at a more reasonable time.
While the quality of Skype calls definitely varies with internet speeds, I do love the convenience of being able to make an international phone call from almost anywhere. The quality does seem to be better from computer to fixed line rather than from computer to computer. Don’t know why.
Like you, we buy local sim cards (prepaid mobile service) in each country we stay for more than a couple of weeks. They are normally cheap - $15 or less, including a chunk of credit. The ease of making local phone calls and being easily accessible by locals is worth the money.
Thanks for the honest review. We haven’t done much research into this yet, but this is the first negative comment I’ve seen about the service. We will definitely have to give this a thorough look. I wonder if others haven’t mentioned the inadequacies b/c they are simply trying to reach home. Like you said, trying to conduct business and reach clients on deadline adds stress and frustration to the situation. As you have ‘home base’ for such long periods of time, would you not qualify for local phone service?
On Christine’s original points —
Call quality: There’s a comprehensive guide on the Skype website, but in general you’ll get much better call quality using a headset in a quiet area with a high speed internet connection – not necessarily factors associated with internet cafes
Dial-in conference services: 800 numbers should work fine with Skype; if there are particular services you’re having trouble accessing, give me a shout and I’ll try to track down what’s going on.
Local numbers: To add a new country to our list for online numbers, we have to negotiate a good deal with a local telecoms operator who makes the connection from Skype to the phone network, and these take time to set up. Keep an eye on the Skype blog, as that’s where we’ll announce any new additions to our list of countries.
Dialling numbers: This sounds very strange – if you can provide some more details on when this happens, that would be great.
I hope that helps – do let me know if you have any more questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Christine-
I’ve used Skype for a couple of years now, and have found that call quality does vary dramatically… and it doesn’t seem to depend solely upon the country one is calling to or from. VOIP technology has a way to go before it will be able to fulfill its promise.
That being said, I have a $25 headset and it works perfectly well when Skype is functioning well.
Anyone here have experience using other VOIP providers??
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Hi Christine -
I’ve been following your blog for a while and really enjoy it.
I thought I’d jump in here because I’ve used Skype and find this review really interesting. I think that when traveling, Skype can be a really useful tool. A lot of internet cafes have Skype installed on their computers and headsets available, so if you use it to call for free (computer to computer) it can be a real money-saver. That being said, I agree with you that I would never use Skype as my primary phone, or for important calls.
Keep up the great blogging!
Donna from BootsnAll.com
Thanks for this review–I’m moving to Germany in less than 2 weeks and am planning on using Skype in addition to a cell phone. Does anybody have recommendations for good, not too expensive headsets?
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Interesting review for sure. VOIP is bandwidth intensive so using it at an internet cafe where the owner is understandably trying to keep costs low may be part of the trouble…
Can anyone reading here comment on the skype standalone phones versus computer/headset combo?
Here at the South Pole our primary phone communications back to the states is VOIP and works well when there’s lots of bandwidth available
At my current job, (I am still in the States) I telecommute daily using Vonage. From a high speed internet connection, the voice quality is so-so. However, if I am in the middle or an intensive upload or download, I do not even bother using the phone. A few of the guys in my company have attempted to use Vonage from overseas and it only worked for roughly 1 in 10 meetings.
I am leaving in a month or so and, at least for the moment, I am planning on using Skype as my primary way of calling back to the States. I will let you know how it works out but, because of this post, I will consider the cell phone/SIM card route as well.
I recently purchased the Platronics Audio 625 Headset and I have been putting it through its paces. I chose this model because it has both a line in port and a USB input. If desired, the line in (speakers and microphone) can plug into the USB input. The USB input has a built in driver and adds a digital sound quality to the audio. The difference between the digital and analog inputs are slightly noticeable but not something to get up and dance around your house about.
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Well, we are going on our 3rd year of an open ended world tour and we love Skype and use it as our main communication. We do have a global phone but hate it and have not even used it at all this year.(That was one of our poorer choices along with the satellite).
We love the webcam aspect of Skype that allows us to keep close contact with family and friends which is really important when traveling as a family. We get to do show and tell over it with things like which teeth got lost in what country. lol Grandma’s need to see these things, grandkids need to show em.
We even do my daughter’s piano lessons over skype:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ar90wOnWnM
That has been wonderful and a total godsend. We have also done collaborations with schools and do almost all of our business via skype calls.We do not even use headphones, just our computers. Often it sounds like the person is next door and we talk for hours.
Mostly it works great…
BUT not always and it can be a pain in the butt sometimes.
We have a family joke about a conversation we had with my daughters aunt. We asked can you hear me? And she answered “yeah, I hear you great BEE OOP.”
Yep, that bee oop sound is what you get when it cuts out. Some conversations are really bad and annoying. Really not fun when you are trying to iron out a bank or insurance problem etc.
Sometimes it helps a lot just to call back, often that makes the difference, some times not.
It is not 100% reliable and can be a pain, but for FREE it is pretty terrific. We have great reception and experience ( like you are talking next door to someone a continent away) on over 90 percent of our calls.
We almost never make them in internet cafes as we try to avoid them whenever possible. We have made them with wifi and satellite ( where they are not suppose to be so good) and even with my sis when she just had a dial up on another continent. If connection is less good we shut off webcam and that helps.
It works best if both parties have a good computer connection or computer to land line, but we also call lots of cell phones & have managed well even with pretty bad internet connection. Some wifi in Europe is horrible.
We even make most of our local calls in Spain on Skype even though we have a Spanish cell phone there.We prefer free and love Skype despite it being frustrating once in a while.
It has been one of our tip top choices.
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Soultravelers3:
I totally forgot about the webcam feature, but I LOVE that. When I’m in one country and my husband is in another, the webcam saves our marriage. For real.
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Interesting take on SKYPE.
I purchased a headset for about $10 a couple years ago and have been using it, without any problem, nearly everyday. My girlfriend and I are attempting the longest of long distance relationships and we can honestly say that the headset is the only thing keeping us together!
But really, I have had no problems in consistency. We both use our home internet service, that provides independent DSL speeds in each home. The sound is good and there is no delay. Sometimes the video can be a little off.
I have had problems in the past, before I was using it at home, when I tried using it in an internet cafe. IN a cafe in Latin America, for example, they will have 2-3 connections for nearly 100 computers. Go to call at a busy time and the internet is slow and the calls suck. Its all about SPEED.
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I used a prepaid cell phone for calls and texts to friends within France, but Skype to talk to my mom and friends back home. My roommate used Skype as well and we both loved it. I never used a headset, just spoke into the built-in microphone in my computer. Yes, the sound quality can vary, but for the most part I was really happy with it. I mean, computer to computer, the service is free. You can’t beat that!
The most important thing is to have options. Combining Skype, a prepaid cellphone, and international calling cards will cover all the bases.
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So far, so good for us with Skype. We’ve been using it for a few years during the many months each year Jeff is in Sweden. (I agree with those who say it and its video function can do wonders for long distance relationships!) We do have times when it doesn’t work spectacularly, but that’s usually because we’re on a poor Internet connection. Computer to phone calls have the best success, because we just have to be sure our Internet connection is reliable and not the other person’s. Of course, those type of calls aren’t free so you have to see if it’s worth it. We somehow managed to get one month of computer to phone calls for around $3, so that’s working great for us. But, we do also have cell phones for which we buy local sim cards, but in general we only use those for in-country calls and for emergencies. I hope you guys are able to come up with a good (and affordable) solution for your husband.
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I live in Mexico and use Skype to keep in touch with my family and to do business on the rare occasions when email won’t suffice. My main complaint is the delay, which is a fairly consistent problem depending on who I’m calling. For some reasons no matter when I call, I have the same delay problems with certain contacts. For the rest of my calls, it works great.
I use a $30 headset and no one complains about the voice quality.
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I’ve found that Skype works really well as long as your internet connection is fast enough. I’m on a plan that gives me at least a megabit most of the time, but if I download too much it drops me down to 64kbit/s. At 64k, Skype performs really badly (but then, so does anything else on the net).
I live in New Zealand and telecommute to a job in California, calling in to a conference bridge with SkypeOut for weekly meetings, and doing one-on-one meetings with a computer-to-computer Skype call (with video). This generally works well. The conference bridge is a 1-888 (free) number, which Skype lets me call for free, so the bit about 800 numbers being a problem comes as a surprise…
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@Peter Parkes - I’ve experienced the same issue dialling numbers, with FreeConferenceCall.com calls. Often a single number gets recognized as several — dialling 123456, the call service says “you dialled 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 3 3 3 4 5 5 5 5 5 6 6 6″. A solution was to always wait until the operator finished talking before starting to dial, so it may have been an issue with the service rather than skype. (Haven’t experienced this for a couple of years anyway.)
Phillip Pearsons last blog post..Rest cycle, 100 pushups
Have used Skype and gave up. I now use “webcalldirect.com” which works great - sound quality is good and it works without any software to install. It needs a local line to call in so hard to use in a cyber cafe…
I use Skype all the time but seldom use the voice chat. When I did it was perfectly clear and I use my less than $10 handset. Maybe I was just lucky!
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I traveled around the world for 6 months last year and used Skype regularly, calling my family to keep them apprised of my location. The calls always were easy to make and had god quality, as long as I could get a broadband connection. I too have a SkypeIn number so my family can call me, but upon returning I got a GSM cell phone and had it unlocked so I can just buy a local sim card whenever I am in an overseas destination.
ive tried the prepaid phone in the uk.. and ended up having to refill it so often it was getting so expensive, last trip i tried this new thing, i rented a phone from travelcell and they ship it to you two days b4 you leave and you have two days after you get back to ship it back… the rates are great and the customer service is amazing, its deffinately a better deal. i totally reccomend them and they have phones for all over europe.. check em out, travelcell.com