Voip - Skype or Voip Buster?
Posted by Steven on May 4th, 2006
With the advent of broadband, internet speeds now enable high quality voice and video streaming. Voip is a technology that was developed over the internet to enable people to communicate as easily as using a phone without incurring the costs a fixed land line would usually incur.
Over the last couple of months i have had a number of occasions where Voip proved to be very useful. Calling abroad from here (Malta) is expensive to say the least. Voip on the other hand is a standard rate for the entire world, provided that your internet connection is stable enough to support it.
The Voip applications, which worked best for me, were Skype and Voip Buster. Both these clients have similar if not identical price ranges for calling landlines, and free of charge when calling users using computers.
Skype worked fairly well most of the time. I did find Skype’s echo service useful to test whether the connection with the Skype services was clear enough at that point in time to make a call. Skype also offers a variety of clients, which are Windows, Windows Mobile, OSX compatible.
Voip Buster on the other hand offered slightly superior sound quality but is limited to Windows only. Voip works on standard SIP protocol so most probably if one downloaded a SIP client for their preferred platform, they might be able to achieve similar quality of service.
The battle between Voip clients in my opinion is a pointless one. From my own personal experience, no two clients offer the same sound quality on the same connection and price variations are negligible. Which means that every one should keep a copy of their favourite clients handy, and use the one whose network is more feasible at that point in time. Overall I would say that both the mentioned clients give fairly good service quality and very acceptable performance. If the targeted platform is windows I would go with Voip Buster, but if a Pocket Pc is an option the Skype would be the sweeter solution.
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