I was one of the early adopters of Skype, the, now ubiquitous voice over IP application/platform created by Niklas Zennström of Kazaa’s fame and now owned by eBay. But, truth be told I never really warmed up to it. You could say it was imposed on me when its simplicitly stood there laughing at my efforts to convince friends and colleagues to use erratic, badly written SIP [on Wikipedia] softphones in the period between 2002 and 2003, while everyone seemed to favour it instead. And not without good reason: SIP softphones in 2003 more often than not didn’t work at all, almost universally required port forwarding and didn’t do NAT [on Wikipedia] transversal. They also almost universally sported hideous, malfunctioning and completely unappealing user interfaces. Skype, on the other hand, was easy, simple and — more importantly — worked. Just like that. Out of the .dmg/.rpm/.deb/.exe. No hassle, no configuration.
By 2005 Skype was the main way I was communicating with friends in Hellas, the U.S. and other EU states and I was slowly getting used to the idea that a single company run by people with a somewhat controversial past more or less controlled my communication needs. By then I was also paying some money on SkypeOut, but it was a fraction of my previous phone bills, so I couldn’t complain. When I moved back to Hellas in the summer of 2005, I even got myself a UK SkypeIn number so that friends that had no computer, didn’t use one often or just didn’t like Skype, could call me on a London landline instead of my Athens one.
Today SIP softphones are not as bad as they used to be. There are also a number of hardware SIP phones that can work with hundreds of SIP providers and cost more or less as much as a Skype hardware phone does — and much much less than Cisco’s 79xx series phones cost some years ago. There are hundreds of services based on SIP that are competitive to Skype. In the mean time, more and more ‘features’ crept into Skype and its performance, at least on my three year old Powerbook G4, as of version 2.x is dismal. Lately I’ve also been having the dreaded ‘white noise’ issue that hundreds have experienced, if numerous online forums, including Skype’s own, are any indication. Finally, the Skype client on Linux and Mac OS X is much worse than its counterpart on Windows and very much lagging behind in features and performance. Since I’m not using Windows at all, I guess many of the issues I’ve been having may not be affecting the Windows version.
Needless to say I was not very happy with Skype and while the Skype craze amongst my peers seems to have subsided — fewer of my contacts are online at any time now than they were two years ago while Skype subscribers have skyrocketed — there were very few alternatives that were as easy to use as Skype so that my friends could switch to them or at least use them in addition to Skype and acceptable from a technical/ethical point of view at the same time. So about a month ago I got myself a Linksys VoIP phone, the SPA-942 and started actively looking around for accounts on SIP providers.
One of accounts I opened was with Gizmo, a service very much like Skype operated by a U.S. company called SIPPhone, that doesn’t use Skype’s proprietary peer-to-peer protocol, but favours the open SIP/RTP protocols. I had tried Gizmo in the past: Back in 2005 I found its client embryonic in features and lacking in polish. Its performance was also subpar compared to other SIP providers and, of course, Skype. I can state that this is not the case anymore: while its client’s UI is not exactly well-designed (or appealing), the application has improved immensely. It is also much lighter on my system resources than Skype and it doesn’t come with any of the criticisms people have expressed for Skype’s design, proprietary nature and features. I’m also not getting the white noise issues I’m getting with Skype. Better yet, I can use Gizmo with my hardware SIP phone, or if I prefer, set up Asterisk, an open source suite of applications that I’ve also mentioned in the past and the de facto leader in software PBX [on Wikipedia] create my own personalised dialplan for all of my SIP providers.
Since switching to SIP providers and my Linksys VoIP phone things have been relatively smooth. Since I’m using an Ethernet phone, I’m ‘available’ 24/7 on Gizmo and a couple of other accounts, the quality of the calls is great, even at peak hours, despite not having any QoS capability on my router and the line being in constant use by other members of my household. I’m generally much happier that my communication needs is not controlled by Skype or any other single company for that matter. If a provider doesn’t suit my needs I can always switch to another very quickly without investing in new hardware or downloading and configuring new software on my machines.
There’s only one problem: Most people are used to and generally like using Skype. And while SIP rules the corporate world, Skype rules the households. Non-technical people rarely understand the value of open standards and even those that do often have (economic) reasons to fight them. But people do understand ease of use, low cost and good service. And I guess it’s up to the SIP providers to make sure that their products can compete with Skype adequately in all ways — technically, economically and ethically, that the peering between their networks is easy and painless and that people find their solutions as good or better. Fortunately, things are looking quite good for SIP. At least much better than they did three or four years ago. For the time being, Skype is still installed on my machines. Hence the ‘kind of’ in the title. Does it get used? Very rarely, if at all.
