Skype In Iraq

I discovered Skype in Iraq back in 2004. At that time I would sign on and talk from my computer to my wife at home in San Antonio through her computer. We both purchased skype compatible head sets. The computer to computer service was free (and still is).

Back then, I remember some 2,500,000 people would be online talking on Skype. Reception was clear as a bell. This past weekend, I noticed that some 11,000,000 people were online so their service has really grown!

Now that it has grown so much, the reception when talking computer to computer on the free service is not so clear. Many times you get a lot of background noises and disturbances. The good thing is that it is still free and if you use it during off hours, you can still have a pretty decent phone call that costs you nothing but time.

Skype in Iraq and in Afghanistan offers a lot of different services but I always stayed away from these because I thought they would be expensive.

Until this past weekend (March 2008). I needed to call home and talk to my wife on the phone and not just computer to computer.

So I bought some Skype time. The charge was $10 and I was thinking I would use this up very quickly.

So I called home and talked for an hour. The charge was less than a dollar. I was really happy with this. When calling back to the states there is about a one second delay. Not bad considering how far it is traveling.

Now some companies will not let you have this on your computer because it uses up too much bandwidth. If your company has a good system and not too many people on at a time, it should not affect anything. But the more bandwidth your company has the more the cost for that bandwidth. The more of the bandwidth used, the slower the system gets.

At our camp, it is easy to tell when someone is downloading a movie. The system slows way down. But our IT guys have installed a system so they can monitor this and when they see someone downloading a movie that is causing the system to slow down they simply kick them off. That means the person has to restart the download.

Also, I saw a gizmo by Vonage that does the same thing as Skype in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are getting to be more and more options to call home. I can call home on my cell phone as well. But this uses a lot of minutes so I do not do it often.

My wife and I both feel that the free phone service is a wonderful and generous service brought to you by Skype and we are grateful to them for providing free phone service halfway around the world. Try them out today!

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