Skype

Cairo, Egypt

 

After getting taking to the cleaners for making a phone call to California from Vienna back in October, I held off making any more international phone calls until the holiday season. For the Christmas call home, I decided to try using Skype, an extremely popular service that EBay recently purchased for over 2 billion dollars.

 

Skype is simply voice over IP and allows you to talk for free from one PC to another PC (or to a Macintosh). The phone call from Dahab, Egypt to Ottawa, Canada was amazingly clear and had little to no delay.

 

The downside with this system is that you have to make sure that the partying you're calling is at their computer when you make the call. Skype offers the ability to call from a PC to a standard land line or cell phone, but it requires you to setup an account with them for billing purposes.

 

Sadly, you can't setup such an account using a credit card from Egypt. I suspect the Skype servers detect that I'm trying to create such an account from a computer terminal in Egypt and disable the "Credit Card" option for security and fraud reasons.

 

I got around that by having a friend in California log in and using my credit card number, added some balance to my Skype account. The end result is that I can now make long distance calls from anywhere in the world to any phone number in the world for around 3 US cents per minute! The quality is actually quite good and again, there is little to no delay.

 

Now, the only requirement is that I have to locate an internet cafe that has earphones and microphones on each computer terminal, which in Cairo and in Dahab, is just about every cafe. No idea if that will be true for countries in Africa, but just the thought of being able to make calls back to North America for only 3 US cents, regardless of the originating country, is pretty exciting.

 

So yeah, Skype is pretty cool and now I've set it up, some of you might be receiving a few more phone calls from me... ;)

 

Kenny