I’ve been looking into Skype as an alternative to using a traditional telephone.

Call quality has been improving and from opinions I’ve read about call quality, it’s somewhere between a cellphone and a landline.

The Skype subscriptions page states that for US$5.99, you can get unlimited calls to landlines within your own country, which also includes cellphones in some countries (not Taiwan yet, but I suspect soon). US$12.99 gives unlimited landline calls to anywhere in the world, but unfortunately South Africa is not included, so a local package will be my first choice.

To make it convenient, we’d need a telephone which supports Skype, without the computer turned on. This kind of phone connects to the wireless router to make the Skype calls. The total savings could reduce our phone bill by about NTD1000 (US$30) which doesn’t sound like much, but adds up over time. The savings would be even more if cellphones for Taiwan get included.

Just a little something for today.