To Sip Or to Skype - Where is the Server?

When using Sip to make your free calls, many providers will make it well easy for you... Until you want to reach a user of another victualer or network, which might prove to be not that simple, and not free either. Calling Sip users of other providers or networks will also want some studying from your part. You can, indeed, reach millions of users, but they are on distinct networks and finding them is not as transparent as consulting a particular directory.

Another divergence that surfaces when using Sip is that you might be required to feed determined facts into your program, such as servers and ports. You will also end up getting involved with a few other technical details here and there. It is well worth it and it will commonly grant you passage to more free services than using plain free Skype. It comes at a cost, though: you must secure up some minimum expertise in order to make things work.

Server

As a free Skype user, you are commonly restrained to Skype's network at the moment of placing free calls, but you get a program that most of the time works out of the box. You don't need to configure anything, and you don't even know where the Skype server is.

There are well several Skype servers. A main server holds all the accounts (that is why it takes a little long to sign on, since users are authenticated from one particular central location), and you have many distinct servers that allow you to place calls. another copy of the Skype program in use by any of the millions of citizen around the world will know about Skype servers in the vecinity, and it will let your computer know the location of the nearest Skype server on the internet. Skype will, more often than not, find all primary servers in a way that will be wholly transparent to the user. In that regard, the divergence in the middle of using Skype and Sip is pretty much like using Shareaza or Ftp (file exchange protocol) when you send and receive files. Anyone who has used an Ftp program knows that there is exact facts about the server (such as address and ports) in order to be able to upload or download files.

That divergence is no coincidence at all, since the authors of Skype and Shareaza are the same citizen and, in both cases, you don't need to know which server you are using, neither do you need to feed the program with technical facts in order to get associated (with a few exceptions).

One day we will inspect a fusion of both approaches: the business accepted and openness of Sip plus the peer-to-peer advantage of Skype (that allows you to use it without knowing where the server is) plus its quality to get straight through firewalls. We will also be able to find everybody as if they were clients of the same network or provider, no matter what kind of service, technology or victualer that person will be using. By now, what we can do is to use Sip, Skype -or maybe a little bit of both- to make our free calls, economize on our local telephone service, and save big on long length calls.

To Sip Or to Skype - Where is the Server?

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