Bandwidth ''light'' Skype equiv...

[Andeh13]

Hi Guys,

My Dad is abroad with the military for several months and needless to say, the access to the internet is very very slow, and very very limited. He has been trying to use Skype to communicate with my mum, but it is terrible quality and only 10-20% of it is actually 'workable'. This is causing no end of stress.

He keeps saying he had wished he had bought an Apple laptop as they seem to work fine (according to others out there).... this makes me wonder if Facetime (whatever Apple's Skype equivalent is) is much less bandwidth hungry then Skype?

Can anyone comment on this, or suggest a simple, easy to use, bandwidth ''lightweight'' voice program to use over the internet?

Cheers guys

[jim]

According to skype, it requires a minimum of 30kbps to run voice calls, recommended 100kbps, which is still very little. I can't imagine that there's software that uses dramatically less, would assume it's something other than Skype that's causing the issue.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Latency problems?? He might be using a satellite connection.

[Phage]

Try Google Voice ?

[mekeirc]

I've heard good things about Mumble.

It's also Open Source.