Free telephone calls.

international | sci-tech | other press Wednesday October 20, 2004 19:44 by iosaf

an introduction to a new free telephone call service.

It's legal and free and based in Luxembourg the Skype company founded by Niklas Zennström last August offers users "free telephone calls".

Maybe you all know about this service in which case - "deletion". But if you don't it's yet another example of innovation and "free-ness".

Lots of people, like over 15 million people have downloaded the Skype program, which allows users to make "phone calls" of high quality audio using the internet. There is no charge for the call. The only catch is that both caller and recipient must be Skype users.

Swedish Zennström worked with Janus Friis to launch KaZaA in 2000, one of those peer based audio file swapping programs that allowed for "downloading music". Well that's a long story, and not such a happy scene any more.

It is possible that if we all "turn on" to Skype then the telecom giants will come down big time on the current vanguard of VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) and stop them "going free". But for the moment indications from AT&T, BT, and Verizon are that VoIP is the way to go, and those corps are considering launches of similar products (though probably not free) in the next year.

Niklas Zennström hopes to stay very rich in the future, (and he is already very rich) by offering VoIP to WAP carriers and installing his service on mobile networks, or alternatively charging his current customers (and yep I'm one) for calling non Skype users or making the link between internet and satalite immarsat calls. (this will mean I'll not only be able to call Osama but I won't get charged too much for it) and that the CIA will only be able to locate him, if I cleverly bounce my signal from one bluetooth laptop to another using different software platforms with reduced intercompatibility whilst simultaneously hopping the frontier between two international GSRM networks for the first crucial thirty seconds it takes to say-
"Hello Yussuf, Saleem and all that, what you up to? When are you going to say sorry? How's the wife?"

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Please do not disparage the idea of free phone calls. They are in some way a sort of grail. Ever since Edison went patent crazy the clever and the good and the not so good have been trying their hardest to crack the payphone.
Cough cough, most transatlantic IRA business was infamously carried out from a "free pay phone" on O'Connell street in the 1960s. believe it or not. ( it saved money)
if you don't believe me write SF a letter.

Neither can We forget the Phone bypass tone dialer kits (which the hard working innovators of China poured on the Western market) in the 1980s and everyone had one.
I still do. These cunningly bypassed the payphone but sadly no longer work.
And were and are illegal. Rather like messing about with the A and B button on the really old telephones which was a suspension offence at least (at my school).

Then later on had a mate in PT (telecom eirinn) who ahead of the mega computer xchange had a user code which if prefixed before all numbers made them free (from domestic phones as well).