Folks have started to use the gateway — but so far, i’ve focused on my “early adoptors” …

We just did some calls to/from our office in South Africa. Quality was better than the “regular” telephone. So, the SA folks are now into the swing of things for inbound calls. That’s where the ROI is going to come from.

Admittedly, the outbound stuff is not that easy to grasp. We are making it easy by doing all the “speed dial” setups for folks.

Inbound it’s terrific. Folks that have Skype already know how to call .. and from there, to us, for all intents and purposes, it’s a regular phone call — hits the receptionist (she can see it’s a Skype call on the caller id) and she just routes the call as needed.

Gavin

Have your staff started using it? Seems to me to still be a few steps away from being really user friendly.

I’ll be looking for Google to make a great product in the next year that may bring the scalability more practical.

grandcentral.com + gizmo project + google apps for your domain + google phone could be winning combo for the SOB market.

I think that, in recent years, cell-phones have tempered expectations somewhat — cell phone quality being pretty lousy, IMHO. (Luckily we’ve learned where the mute button is for those cell-phone conference calls.)

It’s a function of the compression I think(but I am no expert here). In order to compress the audio, both the high and low ends of the audio is “squashed.” It’s why people describe cell calls as “flat” or, sometimes, “tinny.” VoIP does that too. For example, I find Vonage slightly “flat.” Skype, I feel, actually does a remarkable job with the quality, preserving much of the low end. And the bandwidth requirements are remarkably low. It’s lag that drives me bonkers.

Sound-quality-wise, a lot of the experience seems to be a function of the equipment on either end. For regular Skype I use relatively “high-end” USB headphones. People say I sound like a disc jockey …

[Can’t you just hear me saying, in a Basso Profondo: “You’re listening to KCJC, the underground sound of Kansas City.. The last 16 hours of Gregorian Chants have been brought to you by Bruno’s Bread City…]

Usually I probably sound like a regular jockey? Ah.. where was I… oh, yea…

With the VoSKY equipment, the quality is OK — perhaps a little flat; again probably more a function of the phone sets. (I have, for example, heard Skype conference phone boxes that sounded phenomenal.) So far, it’s been acceptable. I have found it “good enough.” And, everybody is usually thrilled by the “free-ness.”

I will say — and I haven’t done this yet — I’m anxious to see how it works with South Africa. I’ve Skyped directly there and the quality was surprising. I figure Europe will be fine, given the amount of bandwidth to/from there. Africa is always a problem — limited international bandwidth and sometimes high lag times as the signal jumps through the satellite hoops.

Where quality is an issue (like an important conference call with lots of muckity-mucks… well, I’ve still got lots of hard, landlines.

Regards

Gavin

Very cool, but then that’s what I expect of you. Question, in using skype I have found the quality of the voice part of the call to be less that telephone-like. Are you finding that to be true or do people just not care?

Gary

question: did you play around with handling things through citrix/ terminal server? (cough, cough) yeah, the mapping of media is shall we say, a point of failure, but if you invoked skype within a user session you could have unique identities (at least, out bound)
doug

Very neat, Gavin. Thanks for opening the door to your server room!