Travel China and Beyond

Are you willing to give VoIP and Skype a try…

Have you tried Skype yet? If you have not than may be you have been in a corner of the world, where the Web does not reach or you are completely oblivious to all the noise VoIP has created over the last several years. At any rate, I thought I should provide some (at least minimal) information on using VoIP in China for those of you who may be planning a trip or relocation to this country.

Over the last 2 years I have used both Vonage (yes, I brought my Vonage Linksys router with 2 phone ports from the States when I moved to Beijing), and Skype. I used that service for almost 2 years until I started testing Skype (testing is a bit of an overstatement I started trying it) and was happy to find its quality good. (I will write about some of the problems I had to resolve to make Vonage work in a separate posting)

Having used Skype with my laptops (both Apple iBook, Dell Latitude, and HP laptop) I decided to take the plunge and buy a Skype phone. The product I purchased is shown here: As you can tell it is a Linksys basestation and cordless phone.  At any rate, the product works fine — I have been using it for 4 days now.  So, if you want to get on with the “program” and start using this new technology, give it a try — you can always go back to the traditional wireline phone….Let me know if you have questions