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As I have mentioned before, I dropped my land line back in October and primarily use Skype for my meager telecommunication needs. I was a bit perplexed when my client was going offline and having difficulty connecting until I heard about the outage. The folks at Skype are attributing the problem to a “perfect storm” of factors that prevented the Skype P2P network from recovering from all the Windows reboots caused by Patch Tuesday. Given that I still had my cell phone and don’t really talk on the phone that much, it wasn’t that big of a deal and the Skype folks are giving seven additional days of service for all of their paid Sype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn and/or Skype Voicemail customers. The most interesting part of this to me is how infrequent Skype outages have been. I was sure there was some other form of network problem. At least now I know to check the Skype Heartbeat site before I start rebooting machines and routers the next time there is a Skype problem. |
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Winner of the 2006 GA Gift of the Year Hot Novelty Award, Verballs are a cute way to satisfy your VOIP needs. Produced by .uk company Aardvark Innovation, Verballs are cuddly USB microphone and speakers that add additional fun by moving their hands and mouth when they emit sound. There are presently five members of the Verballs family, from left to right in the picture to the left: Slick, Striker, Mr V, Britney, and Baby. Verballs get all of the necessary power via USB, come with 30 free Skype Out minutes and are Windows only. Britney is currently available on sale from Firebox.com for $25 while the rest of the crew can be purchased from iWantOneofThose for $60. |
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Yesterday, Skype announced the replacement for their free nationwide Skype-to-phone (also known as SkypeOut) promotion within the US and Canada. To continue the privaledge will cost you $30…a year. Or about what most of the VOIPs and POTS long distance telephone provides charge a month for the same privilege. To futher sweeten the deal, if you sign up before 1/31/2007, you can get the low, low introductory rate of $15 a year. Since I jettisoned my POTS line back in October, I am all over this, even though I am not sure I will make $15 worth of SkypeOut calls. If you want to read the terms of service for the agreement, they can be found here and Skype also has a knowledge base FAQ. In a related note, Skype 3.0 for Windows (digg Referer) was released today and I also just noticed Skype 2.0 for Mac even though its been out since the end of October. |
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The Cordless DualPhone 3088 allows you to receive both POTS and Skype calls on a cordless phone without having to get your computer involved. You connect the DUALphone base station to your network and plug in your telephone line (if you still have one) then find a place to plug in the separate phone dock and you are ready to rock. I think this is pretty much what I want for a cordless Skype phone, just need it to get a little cheaper now and available in this country. The RTX Cordless DualPhone 3088 is available at least for .eu customers for $207. |
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It appears that the Netgear Skype WiFi phone previously mentioned here in January is starting to emerge. The folks at Engadget got their mitts on one and posted a few pictures and Gizmodo has a video of its UI in action. It will be interesting to see how popular this device will be once it becomes available to the masses and how well it works. For the average home user, I suspect it will be fine. In public places, things could get a bit more dicey. For one, Skype has the potential to be a bandwidth hog. Wireless being the shared medium that it is, throw a couple of these and some other bandwidth intensive apps on a public wireless access point, and things could get messy. Because of this, many campuses block the use of Skype at least over wireless. Also the SPH101 does not have a web browser thus rendering it useless if browser-based authentication is required to join/use the wireless hotspot. The Netgear SPH101 is presently available for pre-order at Amazon for $250. |
Engadget - Netgear SPH101 Skype WiFi Phone unboxing and hands-on!
Gizmodo - Netgear SPH101 Skype WiFi Phone - Exclusive UI Video!
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Skype announced today that for the rest of the year Skype Out calls (calls from a Skype client to a regular phone) within US and Canada would be free. It is important to note that this does not mean between Canada and the US. There have also been reports of problems of Skyping out from the 70.x.x.x to 79.x.x.x net blocks (digg Referer). Will have to try this. |
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