Skype, Gizmo or Something Else?

Frankly, I haven't had much success in my own efforts to advocate for VOIP usage with friends and family. I suspect that many folks are simply not comfortable speaking to their computers.

Define "better":

Gizmo might in some ways be technically better. But Skype has millions and millions of users, clients for different OS's, soon stand alone phones, which makes it far more usefull.

You even see the Skype logo and "number" appear on brochures, advertising etc. it is becoming a global standard.

So I settled for Skype, because the benefit rises exponentially with the number of users. Sounds familiar not?

Best

Dirk

I've used both on my MacBook but still tend to regularly run Skype. The one thing that I do not like has to do with presence. Often I see other Skype users logging in and out. I do not believe that such a noticable percentage of people are logging in and then out at the same time. This got crazier after the number of users ramped up.

I posed the question "did they not design the network to scale well enough?" A friend of mine more familiar with SIP said that they did not use a true SIP setup but relies on the individual clients to handle the presence states.

Anyhow, one thing that I DO like about Gizmo is that there is a small interface that rates your connection.

Between the two ... I still use Skype more.

Skype routes other people's calls using your computer as zuper node. You never know when suddenly your firewall will show 100 TCP active connections, stealing your bandwidth and cpu usage. That is the price for p2p voip. Gizmo uses stand alone proxy to route calls and traverse NAT and firewalls.
Hovever Skype can use even TCP 80 port for calling, gizmo have to STUN over NAT, and needs at least 3 ports: one for SIP, RTP and RTCP.

Skype resembles Microsoft, because their calling system is closed, unlike Gizmo's. You choose Skype, you're stuck with Skype. No other programs can ever hope to use thier system.
Gizmo, however, uses open standards, like XHTML. Other programs can connect to it.