Advice for better overseas commo back home.

[11B-B4]

Hey all:

I thought I would post this up for the betterment of the whole. I dont know how many of you are struggling with this but im sure some of you are.

Ive been deployed quite a bit in the last few years and have always struggled with finding reliable commo to call home to my girlfriend, who later became my fiance and is now my wife.

Not to go too far in depth but...

We all use skype to call home to our sig others. Well if you call from your laptop to a landline, or mobile line the conection quality is usually pretty horrible. Me and my wife struggle to get one good phone call out of maybe 5. Most sat internet service over in iraq/stan is very low speed... around 16/kbs at best. So thats not enough really to have a quality conversation reliably between skype and a landline/mobile number.

However with the advent of smart phones you can have your family friends download the skype app, have them stay logged into the app and call them using thier skype handle. I have tried this with my buddies and the call quality is crystal clear 90% of the time VS clear 10% of the time when calling landlines/mobile numbers. Whatever the case is it requires less bandwidth to call skype to skype then skype to mobile. Maybe its something to do with translating the data or something idk im not a tech guy.

All i know is skype to skype app on a smart phone is 90% crystal clear.

Im having my wife get a droid/epic/i-phone type phone and use the skype app from now on.

It could make managing your relationships alot easier on your deployments. It sucks that the smart phone services are more money... but im willing to pay 100$ a month to have good communication with my wife and in turn a better relationship.

Hope this helps you guys.

-Evan

 

[11B-B4]

Re: Advice for better overseas commo back home.

Btw: Another added benefit of this is whoever is using the smart phone w/skype app will be able to see when you are on your computer to call you as well...

There are many benefits.

This might be a gay post for most of you but for some of us i wish i had known this 2 years ago.

 

[USAFDoug]

Re: Advice for better overseas commo back home.

So what you are saying is you will be on the computer and she will be on the iPhone? Or will you both be on an iPhone?

 

[Bruiser_Joe]

Re: Advice for better overseas commo back home.

if you girlfriend/wife has skype on their iphone you can call them from your computer for free and talk to them its SO nice. i use it all the time

 

[USAFDoug]

Re: Advice for better overseas commo back home.

Wow that is nice!

 

[11B-B4]

Re: Advice for better overseas commo back home.

Yeah, Computer to skype app on thier smart phone.

There are haji cell phones over here but service is spotty and expensive about 1$ per minute.

Also as an update it appears my buddies with Iphones have much much clearer commo when i call them than my friends with droids.

Problem is I download up to 16 kbps but only upload up to 6kbps.

Seems the iphone is much more capable of clear commo with my slow upload speed.

 

[Kells81]

Re: Advice for better overseas commo back home.

I have been running this setup. When I was in IRaq I had Vonage and man it was tough. When I went to Afghan I hit up Skype and my wife put it on here Iphone. We did notice the call was 100% better on cell skype than cell number. Beats the shit outa vonage any and every day of the week.

 

[ZLBubba]

Re: Advice for better overseas commo back home.

+1 for Skype. We use it all the time.