free calling options, revisited
It’s been quite a while since my last post about the best free voip setup. A lot has changed. Small startup companies that I dismissed earlier now offer pretty amazing services, and other more established ones have continued to grow. Look at Skype, for instance. Although they are the most closed and proprietary of the entire group, their range, breadth, and ease of services, along with their huge (and growing) customer base, has clearly kept them on top. If my friends and family are on Skype, by default, I have to be too, even if I am “pro-SIP.”
Basically, I have Skype but only actually run it when I need to. I had been waiting for a way to call Skype users through a regular phone, and I’ve finally found one! Check out Mobivox. This is a spanking new service which allows you to call your Skype contacts through any phone. I tried it out the day it became available. I had problems connecting, but I emailed customer service, and it was working within hours. I used it, and even though still in beta, the service was very good! All I had to do was call an access number and tell the voice-activated robot which Skype contact I wanted to call. So easy it’s cheesy.
Now what do you do when the person you would like to call does NOT have a computer nor internet service? You set up yourself and that person (make an account for them) on Jajah. This is what I did to call my grandmother in Europe. We both were talking on our regular phones, but were connected through VOIP by Jajah. Amazing, and the quality is great! My grandmother couldn’t believe that such a clear long-distance call was free. You do, however, need to beware all the limitations that keep your account ‘active’. Calls are only free when you call an ‘active’ user. Gizmo is touting a similar ‘All Calls Free‘ plan, but I their limitations seemed way too stifling.
Another mover-upper is Gtalk-to-Voip. I had visited their site months ago, and saw nothing spectacular. Now I go there, and it’s like “WOW!” They have truly integrated different VOIP services (even on different protocols!) over the internet for open and free internet calling. It looks like all the major players (except Skype, of course) are included, such as GoogleTalk, Gizmo, Yahoo, SIP providers, etc. I’m very excited to explore this service further.(..thanks Yannick!)
My original favorite, Ekiga, has been making moves lately as well. With a new version out, a Windows version, and some new features, oldie-but-goodie Ekiga is still up in the running. I particularly like their new “presence” feature - you can add a button anywhere online to show your status and allow people to call you with just one click.
Hi !
Nice review, as usual you’ve done your home work and your good at it
You’re right, things are changing fast in the VoIP world.
Interoperability and free calls are the great challenges. We can see good progress as you noticed, between protocols and with the PTNS network.
Ekiga will provide some new great features for the coming 3.0… Presence and the new roster system (a la pidgin) is really useful, but more great stuff are on their way. I’m testing now a really amazing feature… A killer one. Let’s hope the windows version will be fully ready for the 3.0 and it will be one of the best SIP client around.
Free your speech !
June 7th, 2007 at 4:47 pmHi,
Some news about Ekiga:
The new road map to 3.0 http://wiki.ekiga.org/index.php/Roadmap_to_3.00
What’s important?
* The Graphical User Interface will change heavily to reflect this concept: ekiga will be about contacts, having a roster to siplay them in the main Graphical User Interface, the search feature will change too to reflect that.
Here you can see preliminary work: http://wiki.ekiga.org/index.php/Image:Capture-Ekiga-SVN.png
* Presence support (telling your friends if you’re online, away, DoNotDisturb, invisible…)
* IAX2 support: this is another protocol (from the PABX Asterisk), this will brings compatibility with new softphones (the Asterisk community) and allow to use more VoIP providers. This protocol has been designed to reduce the size of the paquets thus allowing more bandwidth for what matters : voice and video. IAX2 need a server (an asterisk…) to communicate to another peer, it’s not a direct peer to peer communication like SIP is.
* One of the greatest feature Ekiga 3.0 will brings is the improvement of video. Actual developper version can make use of hardware accelerated video display using the graphic card, reducing the CPU usage for video and will bring new video codec: h263 which will bring good compatibility with other video SIP softphone (noticably those on windows) and also h264 (using the codec x264) will give Ekiga the best video codec available today. I’ve tested myself this feature: the video in CIF (352 x 288) is crytal clear, it’s hard to distinguish from a local video using reasonable bitrate (I used 500kbits which is the best my Internet Service Provider can offer me with the G.711 (no-compression) audio codec). I was able to send video up to 25 frames per second using QCIF. This is still very experimental and not available yet in SVN, but i’m glad to tell the world it works well in 64bits under linux as well
I’m really exited to see how this support of video in Ekiga (h264) will amaze users. Video was really the weakest point of Ekiga in communication, this will end with 3.0 ! We also hope to provide greater size of video than CIF.
* Last but not least, Ekiga for vindows will support Directshow, directDraw and directSound, thus allow to use most of the video and audio devices windows can support ! (with feature like automatic detection of USB devices…)
Ekiga 3.0 will be one of the best SIP softphone around for GNU/Linux and Windows.
Regards,
June 12th, 2007 at 11:17 amYannick
Hi
Thanks for the resources, some of them are new to me. I just took a look at Wengophone again, and was quite disappointed, as I was with Ekiga earlier.
June 13th, 2007 at 2:11 pmvery nice blog! i’ve been searching forever for a great voip app for my N95 8G and i’m trying everything! haha! fring just doesn’t have a good quality call but heck it’s free… truphone is great but the rates aren’t exactly uber cheap although it is competitive enough with others. i’m on the way to try gtalk-to-voip and ekiga.
another skype client is im+skype or iskoot; although it hasn’t allowed me to call my skype contacts w/o any credits and that’s just not acceptable. i can’t wait for a real skype made symbian app!
March 6th, 2008 at 8:57 am