Niel Bornstein on the O’Reilly Weblog has posted about using Skype

I downloaded the Mac OS X client last night. It installed
easily, in true Mac fashion. Within minutes I received a call from my
friend and colleague Edd Dumbill — the first time we’ve actually ever heard each others’ voices.

He came through loud and clear, even on the iBook’s tiny built-in
speakers. And although the iBook has no audio in port, Edd reports that
the built-in mic produced decent sound on his end of the connection
across the pond.

We use this at work too, as we regularly communicate with our UK office. It’s brilliant, totally free and the windows installer works as easily as the Mac one (don’t look so shocked). The only problem comes about with itthe transmission breaking up a bit if you’ve got a low-bandwidth pipe & you (or someone on your network) starts downloading something big. But this will soon be fixed, as we’re hopefully changing to a 2MB SDSL link. Joy!

Skype also has the added ability to do instant messaging as well as voice, so you could conceivably replace messenger with Skype, but that would require all your contacts to move over too & the interface for organising contacts needs a bit of work - there’s just one list, no ability to sort into categories. But this is a small complaint about what is a very good, stable piece of software.