No exaggeration. It's my connection to my reason for living (who is on the other side of the planet, in Australia).

... for me. I replaced my landline with it. Sometimes people say the outgoing audio is poor quality, but it never happened to me. Sometimes there are interruptions, but I can live with that.

Skype is about 10% of the cost of toll calls in the country you're in, and about 1/10th the price of international calls. Also, since skype operates on gateways in the destination country, I can be used to to directly call numbers like UK Lo-Call or US WATS, Freecall, etc numbers, that would not be reachable from a normal landline at all, or only at toll charges.

Those are massive advantages for someone who, like me, speaks to people in 3-4 different countries in the course of a normal day.

The right tool for the job, I say.

Skype is multiplatform, since I refuse to use Microsoft products, that is a plus for me.

Melanie

I don't use Skype, for the reason I give below. My eldest son, the one who likes to roam the world, does in order to keep in touch with his mates, so I installed a client on the one Windows computer I still had at the time - there was no Linux client then. This would have been a good few years back, I don't remember exactly when.

It worked - once I'd figured out how to set it up properly, and to get my webcam functioning. I called him a couple of times at the office in Sweden where he was working at the time.

Then I noticed that my firewall was getting a huge number of extra hits. I belatedly realised that this was all down to me activating Skype on my network.

See, Skype is peer-to-peer. This means that each user of Skype acts like a local directory and exchange to enable users to connect to one another without using a central server. Oh, there is one (or more), but I think they mainly supply addresses from which one can get into the peer-to-peer network.

Only problem is, over 90% of these accesses were from addresses in China. I decided I didn't like the implications of that, and cancelled my account.

If you're like me, and your cable company or other ISP gives you an IP address which doesn't change that often, you will get all this traffic hitting your system whether you're using Skype or not. Once your address gets into their system it will never leave. More than five years after I cancelled my Skype account I'm still getting probes on ports I know are used by Skype.

In addition, Skype is a secretive, encrypted and obfuscated program which basically ignores any firewall you may have set up. There are many threads on the internet describing the frustration people - and companies - have had trying to keep Skype out of their systems. Because it's secretive, it's impossible to know what is happening inside of the program. That means that you have no idea if someone else has found a bug or hole in it and is using it to exploit your system. No thanks.

Of course, if Skype works for you, and you're happy allowing your computer (and your bandwidth) being used by complete strangers without any benefit to you, then by all means use it. I prefer to retain at least the illusion of control over equipment I own.

Penny