IM Chat is cool, but voice is better...

Since having ADSL installed a month or two back, our lives have changed somewhat. I was warned by colleagues from work - "once you get ADSL, there is no turning back". Anyway, it has made the world of difference to the way we work now - as we're always "connected". If you've ever used MSN, the benefits of being online all the time, especially from home, are quite nice as we have quite a few friends and family members overseas, and the easiest form of communication is via MSN messenger. Take last weekend for example, both K and I were chatting to her dad, who lives in Perth, on two separate laptops. Or the regular chats that I have with Gary (who lives and works in China), our mutual friend and best man at our wedding. Like I said, IM (Instant Messenger) chat is pretty cool, but with an ADSL connection now, we thought we'd give Skype a try. Skype is an application, not too dissimiliar to MSN, that allows you to setup a list of contacts, and then make voice calls to the contacts, using the internet to carry the call. What's better of course, is that its all free. Ok, you do obviously pay for your ADSL every month, but that's a fixed cost now, whether we make use of it or not. Cutting a long story short, we called Gary yesterday and had a 20 minute conversation with him - with surprisingly good quality sound. Every now and then, there was a bit of a break in the speech, but it was simply buffered, and not distored as a cellphone call can become when out of range. We also put a call through to our mate Ronald Tweedie, who lives in Chester in the UK - again, great quality voice conversation, that cost us nothing. Now the trick is to convince K's folks to get a broadband connection at home :-)