We do not have a fixed line telephone here, and did not have one in our previous apartment either, mainly because getting one is (or at least was, this is being deregulated now) insanely expensive. Both of us having mobile phones, this is not a real problem, but now that we are living in a Broadband Mansion, we are looking into Internet telephony to eliminate the occasional inconvenience of having to find a public phone to place long or long-distance calls.

So, yesterday I bought a USB microphone adaptor for the Mini and signed up for Skype. That expensive adaptor was not absolutely necessary, as it turned out that my old iBook with its built-in microphone works fine. On the other hand, the iBook is always on the verge of completely breaking down (last week it refused to power up until after a full day of rest), so having a more reliable setup is a good thing.

Unfortunately, Skype has been a disappointment so far. While Skype-to-Skype calls work fine (tried that from living room to bed room, and also from Japan to Germany), Skype-to-phone (called SkypeOut) failed consistently, and that is what we would be using most of the time anyway. The problem is quite strange: It works great for about a minute, but then the people on the other end cannot hear us anymore (while we can still hear them). Redialing would give us another minute, but this is obviously a show-stopper. And it happened on every single call we made (to Japan, China and Germany).

I am wondering if the problem is on our end, but since Skype-Skype works fine, even SkypeOut does okay for the first minute, and the Skype forums are full of complaints about SkypeOut (though not exactly about this particular situation), it looks like an issue in their network. Nonetheless, I will try it on other machines ( at work or Internet cafes). Hopefully, this is only a temporary problem so that we can at least use up the 10 Euro we deposited.

The next service I tried is Gizmo. Its rates are much higher than Skype's (China 4.9 US cents/minute versus 1.7 Euro cents, Germany 2.9 v. 1.7, Japan 2.9 v. 1.92) but of course still cheap, and most importantly, I did not have any trouble making calls with it so far.

Unlike Skype, Gizmo gives you 25 cents free credit after the user registration, so that you can test the service for about eight minutes before making a (10 dollar) deposit. Considering that it took about three minutes to figure out that SkypeOut does not work for us, that is a very useful offering.

With both services, computer-to-computer calls are completely free of charge, and neither company has a monthly or a setup fee, so that I will definitely keep registered in case someone feels he needs to have a word with me.