COMMENT
Phone Your Friends For Free!

The ability to make free telephone calls over the internet using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has been available for a while now. The software required in order to allow your home PC to be used as a phone is free and available popularly from Skype, as well as Microsoft and Yahoo, and there are versions available for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and Pocket PC.

As long as you have broadband you can install the software and by plugging in a headset, speakers or USB phone (if you don't have one, you can buy a starter kit from Skype for £4.99) you can start calling your friends around the world with the same kit, for free. And with Skype, for example, you can even call non-Skype friends on their landlines and mobiles from your PC too. And although these calls are not free they should be considerably cheaper than conventional dialling methods. Interestingly, users should not lose out in sound quality either, as the sound frequency range offered by Skype far surpasses that used by conventional phones. And as Skype encrypts everything sent across the internet you can be reasonably sure no one will be listening in.

However, Skype is about to be faced with a competitor. The search engine Google is about to launch its own, free, online voice and instant messaging service called "Google Talk". This service will work in the same way as Skype, allowing uses to make free calls over the internet using their computer and, like Skype the code will also be open source, allowing developers to use the technology to integrate with other applications. However, unlike Skype users will not be able to call landlines and mobiles. Google also insists that users must sign up to its email service 'G-Mail' in order to use the Google Talk service, too. And Google's entry into the VoIP market is sure to shake it up a little. Although Skype has over 50million users, Google, being so well known globally could vastly increase the use of free PC to PC calls, all over the world.

Of course, the firms that won't be best pleased about all of this will be the traditional phone companies, as the ability to make free calls globally will undoubtedly affect their profits. But from the consumer's point of view, the ability to make free calls using technology we have at home anyway is great and the more companies offering it, the better!

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