Using Skype for voice calls while traveling is easy and often free

Only a few years ago, trying to make or receive phone calls while traveling was difficult and often very expensive. That can still be the case in many places without a good tourist infrastructure, but several recent developments have made it easy and cheap, even for quality that is amazingly good.

Skype is the best VoIP service

Forget bringing a mobile phone and dealing with sim cards, and also forget about those confusing calling cards that were necessary in most countries until recently. Sign up for a Skype account, and you’ve got a free and easy way to make calls anywhere you can get on the internet. VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, and Skype is the biggest and best of the competing services offering these calls.

Basic free Skype service

With the popular free Skype account, you can make free calls between two computers that are both running the software. The quality of the calls is shockingly good, and usually quite a bit better than a standard phone call. Skype also includes a good text chat/instant messenger service (similar to Yahoo Chat or AIM), and this can also be a great communication tool for long-term travelers. As long as both people are signed on, you just click on the phone icon next to the person’s name, and a second or two later they are being summoned into the conversation, and once they accept you’ll be speaking to them. As long as you are on the internet already, this is all free.

Video calls on Skype

As long as at least one person has a webcam set up, you can make video calls with Skype for no extra charge. The quality will certainly get better, but as of now both ends need to have a pretty solid connection and good hardware for the video to look decent at all. Using video when it works is great, but for traveling you should probably assume that most of your communication will be voice calls.

SkypeOut to make calls to actual phones

Having the ability to speak with friends and loved ones while traveling is great, but there will definitely be times when you want to ring someone with an actual phone, whether it’s to confirm your next hotel reservation, or call the mobile of that person you met last night. This part isn’t free, but it’s usually amazingly cheap and easy, especially to landlines.

To establish a SkypeOut account, you need to deposit some money with a credit card or Paypal. For US citizens it’s $10, and probably a similar total for other nationalities. Calls to landlines in most countries are only 2.1 cents per minute. Calling mobile phones can be tricky, as many countries, especially in Europe, charge the caller for the airtime instead of the receiver. So calling a mobile phone in the US will still cost only 2.1 cents per minute, but calling one in the Netherlands will cost 27.1 cents per minute. It’s usually cheaper and easier than buying a sim card and buying local time, but it still feels like a rip-off compared to calling landlines, or the free computer calls.

You can also sign up for unlimited monthly outgoing calls to landlines, at rates that are very good for those who talk a lot, but calls to mobile phones are still billed as extra, so be forewarned before you sign up.

Making calls with Skype-Out

Making calls to actual phones is very easy once you do it the first time. You just enter a + and the country code, and then dial the rest of the number. Skype will even begin formatting the number for you and confirm the country you are calling, so it feels like less of a gamble than dialing with a phone.

What you need to use Skype for phone calls

You’ll need a computer connected to the internet, as well as a headset of some kind. Many internet cafes already have the Skype application sitting right on the desktop for you, so it’s a matter of clicking on it and plugging in your headset.

Since more and more places offer free Wi-Fi, it’s getting easier to travel with a laptop and never even bother with internet cafes. Due to the explosion of the Netbooks, which are cheap and small laptops, the number of people traveling with computers has gone up dramatically in the past year or two. Even a computer with an okay connection and a slow processor will usually have enough power and internet bandwidth to make amazingly high quality voice calls, so you won’t need to search around for ideal conditions. You can also make video calls, but this usually does require nearly ideal conditions on both ends in order for the quality to be worthwhile.

Which kind of headset do you need?

This is confusing at first, but you can use either a headset with only audio jacks (one input and one output), or a headset that uses a USB plug that goes into the computer instead. Some new headsets offer both choices, though that’s probably not necessary since virtually every computer you’ll find will have audio inputs as well as USB slots.

When finding a headset to travel with, you’ll obviously want to find one that is light and sturdy, and collapses into a small package. Plantronics makes many that fit this description, some that start around US$25. You might also consider a special headset called the Ipevo St4rt, which is tiny, unbreakable, and cheap. It fits your hand like a phone receiver instead of sitting on top of your head, so it’s not ideal for very long calls, but it’s perfect for traveling.

Receiving Skype calls on the road

You can also sign up for a service called Skype-In, which assigns you a real phone number at which you can be reached. Prices for this service start at only US$5 per month plus calls, so at least it’s cheap, but most travelers probably won’t need this service, and it doesn’t mix well with moving around a lot anyway. If you are going to be stopping in one place with easy internet access for a long time, this could be an excellent tool, but for those concentrating more on their trip, it’s more of a hassle, and all the above methods will work in most situations anyway.