VOIP Woes

VOIP? What the hell is that?

To be honest, I haven't even heard of this thing till about a few years ago when skype came along. Till today, I still don't understand the underlying details of how it works.

Definition from wiki: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a general term for a family of transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications over IP networks such as the Internet or other packet-switched networks.

This doesn't mean much to anyone at all. To put in simply, VOIP is the technology to make phonecalls using the internet. It does that by transmitting your voice as data through the internet (imagine uploading) to the receiver. At the receiving end, the data is converted to an analog signal that we can hear. (This explanation sounds pretty good, but anyone well versed in VOIP can feel free to correct me)

Why am I suddenly interested in this? Well, right now that's what I am using to call back home.

I remember last year (2008), where LC and I had to buy a calling card. Walk down to the public phone. Insert 50 cents into the damn phone and make a call home. It doesn't sound like a great deal to you but imagine standing there at night with strong winds and temperatures below 10 degrees. It is not fun. On top of that, if the receiver on the other end decides not to pick up the phone, we hang up and the 50 cents is gone. Very frustrating. A few times, I feel like wrecking the damn phone.

After that, we tried a few other methods to call back home.

Our internet service provider gave us an VOIP account but we found that the service is quite expensive. To make matters worse, our phone has a weird dial tone 95% of the time we want to make a call (though we can receive calls without issue). I suspect it is a problem with the damn phone but I am too poor and lazy to fix it.

We also tried calling home using our computers. It was quite horrible. I always remember instances of LC and me screaming into the webcam mic while the other party says, "Huh huh? What did you say." Frustrating. It is cheap though. But the background noise and poor call quality is unbearable.