One of the great benefits of this gig is getting to try out all the latest web stuff in the interests of research. Over the last six months or more, part of this research/adoption business has involved Skype, the Voice over IP application that allows users to route voice calls over the net for free or at low cost. Time, then, to share some observations…
What have I learnt?
• Your landline will ring when you are in the middle of an important Skype call.
• The first time you encounter an interactive phone service using Skype you will hang up because you can’t figure out how to press 3. As soon as you hang up, you will instantly realise clicking the Dial tab brings the keypad to the front.
• Some contacts will end up with multiple means to call them using Skype if you buy SkypeOut credit.
• When the first tenner’s worth of SkypeOut is used up, you will spend half an hour printing out your Skype call details and comparing them with your last landline phone bill.
• Your head will frazzle trying to work out the best use of Skype, your mobile and SkypeIn as opposed to Skype call forwarding.
• If you add a Skype Me button to your email messages and opt to have them display your online status, always remember to have Skype load first before your email software.
• It pays to have Skype regularly check your email address box against their database in order to add contacts that have cottoned onto the service since you first joined.
• Some of the contact matches Skype makes with your address book will turn out to be people who share the same name. Unfortunately, you will only discover this fact three weeks after you have sent a request to share contact details and began wondering why they hadn’t responded.
• The toolbar status icon for Norton AntiVirus 2006, a green circle with a white tick, is almost identical to the icon used by Skype.
And, as if this isn’t enough of an insight to be going on with, yesterday brought another fresh revelation.
As circumstances dictated, I had to call a company based in Ilkeston in Derbyshire. I copied and pasted their phone number from their web site straight into Skype and clicked the green phone button.
To my surprise, instead of displaying the call cost as 0.012p per minute as usual for a UK daytime call, it had jumped to 0.14p per minute. I then noticed the wee Union Jack that displays beside the number you are dialling had changed to another red, white and blue flag and I was calling French Guiana.
Eh? I clicked the hang up button and went back to the site to double-check the number. A second attempt resulted in exactly the same connection being sought to a number in French Guiana. It certainly didn’t look like a premium rate number, so it was off to the BT.com directory enquiry site to check the dialling code for French Guiana, which turned out to be 0549.
In true TV quiz show fashion, I phoned a friend and asked her to enter the Derbyshire number into Skype. Same thing happened to her as well, so it wasn’t my Skype software that had become corrupted.
After checking the O115 dialling code was right for the Ilkeston area, the only way I could phone the company using Skype was to dial +44115 rather than 0115.
Later, further investigation revealed that any UK number that commences 011x is recognised in Skype as being an international dialling code. What you have to do is click on the flag beside the number you wish to call and scroll through the drop-down menu and select the Union Jack.
Among the other UK exchanges also sporting a 011x dialling code are Bristol, Leeds, Kibworth, Hungarton, Kidmore End, Leicester, Mortimore, Nottingham, Plumtree, Reading and Sheffield.
