I’ve been using “Skype”:http://www.skype.com/ a fair bit lately. More precisely, I’ve been using “Skype Out”:http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/ a fair bit lately. Skype Out allows you to make calls using Skype’s interface to pretty much anywhere in the world. It’s a prepaid service where you purchase a minimum of 10 Euros worth of talk time which is deducted per their “rates”:http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/rates/ (calls within the US are €0.017, a little over 2 cents/minute). The international rates are great (it’s €0.017 to a UK landline, but calls to UK mobile phones are €0.205). This is a handy service for me right now, because I keep running over my minutes on my cell phone plan (I’m switching plans soon).

The call quality has ranged from excellent to almost walkie-talkie-ish, but almost all calls are pretty clear. And my set-up is not very sophisticated… just an old boom mike and headset that didn’t cost very much.

The two disadvantages of the service I can think of are the lack of “DTFM”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTMF tone support (being able to send touch tones for voice systems) and the lack of an address book for contacts that don’t have a Skype account (this may exist, but I looked for it twice).