Adventures in Skype

[acb]

I picked up an inexpensive headset (i.e., a set of voice-quality headphones with a microphone attached) today, and have started playing around with Skype (the Linux version at the moment); in the late evening, I called various family and friends back home from my computer (through the paid-for net-to-phone gateway they have), spending about €3.34 in the process (mostly on people with mobiles; calling mobiles costs about 10 times as much as calling a landline). It seems to work OK, though the sound quality is a bit poor and there are occasional dropouts (even on calls to landlines). And the latency seems a bit worse than going through a calling card; the time between one saying something and the other party hearing it is long enough to say the next thing, if one is not careful.