I continue to be in love with Skype. I’ve been a regular user since moving to Shanghai because it has given me consistently better voice and video quality compared to my old friend MSN Messenger. Today I had a 3-way teleconference between myself here in Shanghai, Japan and the USA. It would have been 4-way if my brother’s mic was working. The quality was good and, as we were all using the Skype client on a computer, it was completely FREE. I remember my first years of living overseas and trying to keep in touch with family and friends. It was expensive. One or two hundred bucks a month easily for international phone calling. Now – nearly nothing.
If you haven’t used it before just go to the Skype page and read up on it. Simply put it is free voice, video and instant messaging between Skype users. You can also pay to “Skype Out” and use it to call at very low rates from your computer to any normal phone number. Just be sure to get a headset otherwise the person on the other end might have difficulty hearing you unless the built-in mic on your pc is particularly sensitive.