As if risking your life isn’t bad enough

March 10, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis

AT&T is ripping off our GIs trying to call home from Iraq and Tom Evslin, who knows whereof he blogs, is on the case. Read three recent posts.

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  • http://www.dloye.com/myblog/bBlog-0.7.4.tar/blog/ DLoye

    You wanna stand at the phone on the corner in uniform?

  • Abbey

    This is what is happening to this nation.
    people have been reduce to parasites and they care for nothing except profit.

  • janice

    For $750-1500/month and a computer and skype we could provide FREE phones to service men. Anyone know how many simultaneous phones one could put on a 512K line?
    Grrrr.
    -j

  • http://unbeknownst.net KirkH

    Janice, I believe it’s around 70-80 Kbits/s so six or seven simultaneously would be a good bet.

    So, Skype doesn’t work there and they can’t use pay phones without being shot at.

    If any troops are reading this you can do a tracert to whitehouse.gov to figure out if you’re using a satellite connection. Then do a speed test with an American server to see if Skype is possible or if the govt. is just filtering it out for their buddies at AT&T ;)

    Skype is encrypted by default so the US government might not be happy about its use but it’s rumored that they have a backdoor and so can listen to any encrypted Skype conversation.

  • janice

    One thing I know for sure — If one is on a sat internet connection in Iraq, the quality of the connection on skype will vary from crystal clear to echo-y. It depends on latency…

    In my experience, Skype between Iraq and US via satellite works better than the phone more than half the time.

    …and thanks Kirk!

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  • Ben

    Skype isn’t the only VOIP service in town. There are many VOIP providers, many better and cheaper than Skype, and lots of different ways to talk directly without even using any service at all. Video game players have been using technology like this to speak to each other for years.

    With 512kbs upload you can fit 5-10 concurrent calls with some kbs left for internet overhead (depending on the setup). There is a free codec called gsm that takes about 32kbs and sounds the same as a normal phone. There are ways to fit even more, if you don’t mind a serious degradation in voice quality.

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    And our German soldiers in Masar i Scharif use privately bought telescopes.