{"id":110,"date":"2006-11-22T22:04:46","date_gmt":"2006-11-22T20:04:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/wordpress\/?p=110"},"modified":"2006-11-22T22:04:46","modified_gmt":"2006-11-22T20:04:46","slug":"ekiga-the-free-open-skype-alternative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=110","title":{"rendered":"Ekiga – the free, open, Skype alternative?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while back I wrote a piece entitled Greed and need, or why I’m excited about Wengophone, the ‘open Skype’<\/a>. That piece goes into more detail about why I’d like to see an alternative to Skype, and mentioned Wengophone, a Free, open standards competitor to Skype.<\/p>\n

There seem to be four main alternatives to Skype – Wengophone<\/a>, Gizmo<\/a>, Ekiga<\/a> and Twinkle<\/a>. The OpenWengo website still reverts to French everytime I click a link, which makes it highly annoying to use. Gizmo uses the open SIP protocol<\/a>, but is also proprietary. Since Ekiga comes bundled with Kubuntu<\/a>, which I installed on my primary machine yesterday, I thought I’d take a look at it.<\/p>\n

On setup, the final step is to sign up for an account at Ekiga.net. The frontend of that site seems particularly buggy, as I entered a seemingly valid username, only to have a popup tell me to enter an email (I had), then a valid username, upon submission. I kept clicking, the popups went away, and my form submitted. No feeling of confidence inspired there.<\/p>\n

Of course I then needed someone to talk to. Of prime concern for the success of any VOIP client is that it must run on Windows. Twinkle doesn’t have a Windows version, and seems to have no intention of developing one. From its website, Ekiga seems not to have a Windows client, but I happen to know that one is available, and installed it on a couple of colleagues Windows machines. It’s still not mentioned on the website, as it’s still not ready for the masses and comes with all sorts of disclaimers, but I was determined to give it a try.<\/p>\n

Installation (on my Kubuntu machine) picked up my port-restricted NAT, and suggested enabling STUN server. All as expected so far (although Skype does this kind of magic for you, or should that be behind your back?).<\/p>\n

A call to the test server was disappointing – the sound quality was very poor, much worse than Skype. The voice to me was intermittant, and my voice was very faint (yes, I did up the outgoing volume setting)<\/p>\n

Then I tried to contact my colleagues running the Windows clients (let’s call them A and B – it’s not as unimaginative as all that, their names actually begin with A and B). I got all sorts of problems. I couldn’t get through to A if I phoned her, but she could if she called me. I heard the phone ringing, answered it, but then neither of us could hear each other even though we were listed as connected. I tried B, and had the same experience. Annoyingly, B then called A, and actually heard her (and experienced the ecstasy that Alexander Graham Bell<\/a> must have experienced the first time) for an instant before everything went quiet again.<\/p>\n

Ekiga also has no encryption at all, and then there’s the bug that affects Ekiga on Kubuntu 6.10<\/a>, causing a crash on shutdown. <\/p>\n

On top of all that, I wasn’t impressed by the interface. The dial button, for example, looks like you’re plugging a wire into a socket. It’s native to GNOME admittedly (I run KDE), but that had little to do with my impression. Skype’s design is much more intuitive and easy to use..<\/p>\n

I’d love to see a free, open-standards, VOIP client succeed. Sadly, for my purposes, none of the alternatives come anywhere close yet. Any bored developers out there willing to lend a hand?<\/p>\n

Related posts<\/p>\n