When in doubt, SkypeOut
May 28th, 2008 by brianschettler
The past several days I’ve been having severe trouble with my cell phone at my new place in Bartlesville. It’s probably been this way the entire time, I just haven’t used my phone enough to notice it until a few days ago. AT&T will flat out not keep a connection longer than 10 minutes. What makes it worse is that I’m using my Bluetooth headset and the disconnect “tones” are ear piercing despite the caller being at normal volume. It makes me wrench my headset out of my ear every time.
I couldn’t stand it and I did something I don’t normally do…I made an impulse buy.
I logged on to skype.com and took a look at their SkypeOut options to let me call regular landlines using Skype. Their SkypeOut subscription is $2.95/month with a buy two get one free special. So for $5.90, I have unlimited calling while I’m trapped in sucky cell service land. I sign in on the Skype website and check out using PayPal. Not even ten seconds later, I’m calling Sarah’s cell phone from Skype. The whole process took about 3 minutes. Any longer and I probably would have had second thoughts and just stuck with the cell phone for the summer. But the experience (cringe…hate to use that word) was a positive, hassle-free one. And the voice quality is phenomenal. I may just use SkypeOut from now on.