In a Skypeless world, we might have been less inclined to hang in there, but now separation is less challenging. And who can argue with no long-distance charges and no maintenance fees?įor the past year and a half, I’ve depended on Skype to stay in touch with my girlfriend, a writer and translator who has been based in Vilnius, Lithuania, while I move around from Canada to Europe to the Middle East to, most recently, the Caucasus, doing research for a new book. The sound quality is not always the best - it ranges from a cut above the telephone to echoey or garbled - but there is something comforting in its retrograde tinniness (like jazz on a crackly LP). The technology has created a wave of Skype Love, which means millions of romantic partners around the world can live in different cities, countries, and time zones and not actually be separated, as long as they have a computer with an Internet connection, a microphone, and a webcam. (Skype makes most of its money from people who “SkypeOut,” buying credit that lets them Skype land lines or mobiles for as little as 2.1 cents a minute.) This includes the option of video conferencing.

Its popularity is no mystery: anyone can download the software for free, and talk to anyone else with Skype, anywhere in the world, also for free. Since then, Skype has taken the communications world by storm: as of April 2008, it had more than 309 million registered accounts. Skype was created in 2003 by the same Danish and Swedish entrepreneurs and Estonian software developers who created Kazaa (a file-sharing program similar to Napster). Skype is the most popular and sexiest form of VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol - a technology that allows any computer with a broadband Internet connection to act as a telephone.

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