The other day at Boxaid we received an interesting phone call from one of our customers who was having trouble using Skype in Dubai. He is originally from California and is in Dubai for work reasons and uses Skype to communicate with his children so he could help them with their homework. He has used Skype before and its a great product allowing you use voice and video from your computer to communicate with others using VoIP technology. Well it turns that Dubai and many other middle eastern countries are blocking the VoIP protocols at their ISP levels. Why would they do this? We can’t answer that but ultimately many of those countries are all about controlling what their citizens can say and hear about their government. Either way, it was stopping our customer from being able to speak to his children who were 6000 miles away.
So we tried improving connecting to Skype through some proxy servers but it was hit or miss and the service was consistent. A guaranteed solution would be tunneling all traffic over a VPN service that encrypts or hides all your Internet traffic from the ISP making them unable to analyze what protocols you are using. There are countless services that provide this functionality for an average cost of $10 or $15 a month. Such services (Surfbouncer and Slickproxy are pretty popular) are very handy and make sure your ISP is not snooping your traffic and analyzing what you are doing. But in the case of our customer we were trying to find a free solution. We switched him over to Google Talk since he already had a Gmail account. The best thing about Google Talk is its ease of use especially if you are already using Gmail for your email client.
All you have to do is add the person you want to chat with on the left side of your email page and as long as they are green you simply choose the person on the left and as you can see above you can Email them, Chat, or better yet if you click the Video and More button you can talk to them using your computer completely for free. As long as they are also using Google Chat, there is no cost for the call and you can talk as long as you want. That means they can be on the other side of the planet with an Internet connection and you can talk as if you were in the room with them. Best of all if you have a cheap webcam that you can pick up for $20 online you can also share video and watch them and they can watch you.
The benefits to this technology are obvious. We are constantly making this planet smaller when you can communicate like this for no cost. No more long distance phone calls that cost hundreds of dollars. We used the Google Chat with Voice and Video technology to get our customer connected with his children and it worked very well avoiding the blocking that ISP was doing on Skype. There is always a way around what the government doesn’t want you to see and this was a perfect example of using technology to our advantage. Make sure you try out Google Chat with Video and Voice and reach out to a loved one today.
About George Dover
George Dover is one of the Microsoft Certified Technicians that works at BoxAid.com. He is the primary blog contributor and has helped thousands of customers calling into BoxAid on a daily basis. Connect with me on Google+
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Wow. This is a great idea. I just tried google chat and i love it. I have always used gmail for my email but never noticed the talk and video plugin. Thanks.
Superb article. Thanks a lot.