Daiwa EuroTelcoblog No. 51: Wednesday, 23rd June, 2004 - Turn on, tune in, SkypeOut

A well-connected friend recently gave me a voucher to try SkypeOut, the Skype-to-PSTN service which is currently in beta with users who purchase a Plantronics headset from Skype. I've been playing around with it this evening for the first time and find it to be excellent. So far I've made several calls within the UK and to both US coasts and the Midwest region of the US. The sound quality has been very good, on a par with the PSTN, as far as these ears can tell. A test call to my own home phone, followed by a cellular call to the same, revealed that the latency level on SkypeOut is indistinguishable from that of UK domestic cellular. I'm not supposed to talk about pricing, but suffice it to say that after a handful of short calls, most of them international, I still have 98% of my EUR5 voucher intact.