Build a Skype Server | Save your money

Friday, November 24, 2006

The diffusion of Skype worldwide has made it possible to save, for the same call time, a big amount of money. In same cases, i.e. when calling from one Skype user to another, the call is even free so the amount paid to be phone company is a beautiful zero.

Obviously you still have to pay your Internet connection but we start from the assumption that almost every house has it and already budgeted it.This phenomenon has led some companies to offer VOIP services to their customers but it’s tough to beat the low price of Skype.

The only limitation for typical Skype users is that you need to be near your computer to use it and that a lot of people still prefer to hold a receiver when calling. The immediate solution for the second problem obviously is to buy a Skype compatible receiver or maybe even a Skype compatible keyboard.

The more advanced users instead may decide to take a more radical approach to the problem: build a Skype server. This is exactly what Andrew Sheppard has done and reported in an article published on the Linux Journal website: Build a Skype Server for Your Home Phone System.

It is a detailed tutorial of how to save money using Skype without giving up on the habit of using the regular phone handsets. Basically the article teaches us how to set up a server that runs 24/7 to guarantee us a good quality and continuous service.

If you do not want to abandon completely the “old” system the tutorial also explains how to combine the two approaches. In this way you can use Skype for the normal conversations while reserving the current system for emergency calls or alarms.

Obviously the server runs a Linux distribution and in particular the Fedora Core one. After the article was written other distributions has added their support for Skype so if you are a newbie and you want to use Ubuntu just install the Skype package available for Debian.