Down the Bog

We bought a new phone last weekend from Future Shop. It’s a regular land line phone made by vtech but it’s also designed to be used with Skype.

I’ve used Skype on a regular basis since moving to Canada because it offers very good call rates for me to phone my Mum back in England. She doesn’t have a computer and so although we can’t talk to each other just with computers the service offered by Skype to call from my PC to her phone is very good. In the main I get a great connection and we can hear each other very clearly.

Of course, if a call is made with Skype, computer to computer then there’s no charge made at all.

So as I say we’ve bought this new cordless phone and it’s base unit plugs into the regular land line socket and also into the USB socket of the computer. There’s an easy software installation required to set the phone up and that obviously also means having a Skype account too. Once that’s all done the phone can be used as normal and with Skype.

Pressing the phone button on the handset will bring up the dial tone and pressing the PC button will bring up the list of Skype contacts previously set up on the computer. I’m then able to scroll down the list of contacts on the LCD display and it shows up the people who I can call for free because they have Skype installed on their computer and also the list of people that I use Skypeout with. (Skypeout means using Skype to call a regular phone or cell phone)

For those contacts that have Skype installed a tick will appear alongside their name if they are online with Skype and then I can call them and they can receive the call on their computer. Skypeout contacts can obviously be called anytime because the call is made to their phone.

For overseas Skypeout contacts we buy credit in advance and we also paid $35 for unlimited calling to landlines in Canada and the US for twelve months. We weren’t able to get what we thought was a good deal with Bell Canada for long distance in North America which is why we’ve gone this route and so far it’s been fine.

We’ve used the phone to make calls within Canada using Skype and most of the time the quality of call has been good. Occasionally the connection seems to go quiet for a second or two but then it’s back again and doesn’t happen everytime. My daughter in England doesn’t have a landline to use but does have high speed internet so now she can get onto Skype and call our new phone directly without it costing her a penny because it’s effectively a call from computer to computer. She’s done that a couple of times now and it’s a great way of staying in touch.

So then. So far so good. We’re very pleased with the phone. It cost us $100 so it wasn’t cheap and we didn’t shop around for it so we might have got it at a lower price elsewhere. But I can recommend it as a way of using voip to make calls that are either free or low cost.