NeonHippy

SushiFan, my son is living in Canada, we use Skype to communicate but in addition to the conventional skype to skype voip he has set up call forwarding such that the less tech savvy members of the family can call a UK number which gets forwarded via skype to Canada. The call is included in the caller's inclusive minutes and my son pays a couple of cents per minute. The clever bit is that if he is not at home to answer the call on his computer skype then forwards the call to his mobile. This would be a good way for your wife's family to keep in contact and well worth setting up. It is one of the first things we will be doing when we get to Penang.
I think it also works in reverse but I will check when I talk to him tomorrow.

NeonHippy

IVV I very much doubt that your PC is not powerful enough. In preparation for moving I have put all of our music and videos onto a NAS drive. Using a small £100 PC running KODI I can watch HD programs with 5.1 sound no problem at all. I even manage to stream the video to a £50 Raspberry Pi feeding a second television.
Try talking to your ISP to make sure your settings are optimised for video streaming. If that doesn't work and you are not bothered about watching the TV live (good for everything except sport) you can download the file and watch it later on at full HD.

InVinoVeritas

I think a 32bit Atom W8 machine is still rather feeble for decoding streamed video

This is Malaysia, censored internet is a fact of life and the ISP must respect the government's position

SushiFan

NeonHippy, thank you for your advice regarding the use of Skype. I had indeed something similar in mind.

IVV, no more "reading between the lines" required, I guess.....

annie29

Does anybody know if there are any areas in or near Georgetown where a mobile definitely doesn't work at all? Thanks.

InVinoVeritas

Annie, it depends on whose network you are using, the building you are in, where you are in that building and whether you need data or not. If you are looking for somewhere to live then do check your mobile reception before making a decision. Even if you have a land line everyone will call you on your mobile!

annie29

Thanks for your good advice InVinoVeritas. (Yes, I suppose everyone will always call me on my mobile! I hate to say such a terrible thing, but I would not like to be without my mobile now.) I thought that might have been a good way to exclude certain areas from the home search but no such luck. Best to do like you say.

NeonHippy

My son has confirmed ed that he can use his Skype account to make low cost calls to UK phonelines.

He also thinks that using DNS is the best option for streaming if you are having problems. Apparently the most common approach to streaming is to use 'adaptive streaming' where the server side monitors the data package requests from the client side and compresses the signal down until a constant flow is obtained. He did work for one company where they were developing client software that would announce to the server what the screen size and max resolution of the device was so that the server could transcode the video signal to the reduced size prior to transmission to reduce the data being sent to low end devices. But it is unlikely that it is being used by iPlayer.