Now that I have been in Canada for a couple of months, I have since realised that the long distance calling card thing I bought online before I left is not all it's cracked up to be. I am now looking into Skype.

Now, I understand that this is free if you Skype-to-Skype. However, I will be using this to speak to my Dad back home who firmly believes that a phone is for talking & a computer is for computing. I don't see us doing a Skype-to-Skype call any time soon.

So I see that they have a really cheap option to buy credit & call landlines back home. My question is - Can I buy any old headset to do this, or do I have to buy a proper Skype one? If anyone else communicates this way and has any pearls of wisdom, feel free to share!

I'm sure you can use any old microphone We do.

My mum calls me from her UK mobile, it was a bit of a pain to set up and she had to keep calling them and going into the shop but I think she has it sorted now.

Its an extra 5 pounds on her contract and she has to call me for some reason I can't call her. Also I'm sure it would still cost too much via skype as she doesn't have a landline :curse:

Another thing I'm not so sure he can call you from a landline I might be wrong. You could call him.

Why won't he use Skype on the computer, the webcam is great.

Go to Skype, buy a UK SkypeIn number, and people from the UK can call you anytime the same as calling a standard UK number. It's a regular UK landline number for about $50 a year.

I've learnt something there, thanks Ben.

Another recommendation here for the SkypeIn number. As mentioned above, the best deal is to get a subscription to the UK, which costs 2GBP/month. For that, you will get unlimited calls to UK landlines (useful for calling your dad's landline) and they also include the SkypeIn number, which is a UK landline number that directs through to your Skype account. Calls to UK mobile phones are billed separately at the local UK rate (so you need extra credit for this).

You can use any old microphone on your computer. Many laptops have them built-in, but I've found that a small microphone improves the call quality greatly.

Top Tip - Use the "Forward" feature in the Skype Options to route any SkypeIn calls to your Canadian cell phone. The person in the UK pays a local rate to call a UK landline number; Skype does the UK>Canada thing for free; you pay a local Canadian rate to forward the call on to your cell phone. )

We have Skype Unlimited here, it's $9.95 a month and gives us free calls to landlines in about 50 different countries. We use it to phone locally as well as family in the UK and Australia, even use it to phone my mobile answerphone to retrieve the messages for free We don't even have a landline here, no point.
Any old headset/microphone should do the job but I always used to have problems with USB ones, for some reason they seem to break up a lot more than good old fashioned analogue ones.

if you have people here in the uk on 3 mobile network, depending on there price plan, you will find they proberly have skype for free on the mobile

My mum is on 3 and believe me its not free

Totally get that. My Dad is just the same ...we got a webcam set up for him and my stepmum but he doesn't like being on the screen. He slopes off to the side very slowly until he is completely out of sight! (He says video chatting is "tampering with nature" ...he's not even old and has worked as a technician his whole life. I think modern technology is passing him by ...)

There is no hope of getting him on a plane to visit. He doesn't like that they rely on so many computers. Sigh.

Still, he is very impressed that we can call his landline so cheaply from Skype so I think we'll stick with that!

Has anyone downloaded Skype 4.0? I did the other day and have been having a lot of problems with dropped calls and frozen video. Not sure whether its just one of those things, a network thing or Skype 4.0!

Yes. Ironically Skype 4 was meant to herald a new era of call quality after years of development but I've had similar problems. Call quality was good but reliability not so good, it dropped out several times within a 30min phone call on Sunday.

Yep, we had problems with the 4.0 version as well - frozen screen was not particularly attractive as it was of yours truly mid -yawn on Sunday

Well, I don't know if this would work for you. When I got back to Sweden I found that Three mobile here has something called 3Global. On top of my pre-pay I pay an additional $5 and then call Canada land and cell for $0.03 per minute.

Had a look at three.co.uk and they have something similar. £15 addon for international saver give syou unlimited calling to land and cells in 31 countries. Canada is in that list.

Do you have three in Ireland?

I've actuallly stopped using Skype after I switched to three (and I ported my previous number as well).

Edited to add:

Completely disregard the above as you are in Canada and want to call back to Ireland.

However, maybe the idea is something that your dad could use.

Thanks everybody for all your great replies! Looks like I will be headphone shopping sometime soon & getting signed up for the Skype Unlimited Country option. Only $4.95 a month! Certainly beats the bottomless pit of money that is my current calling card.

Oh very funny, a webcam, hilarious. For the sake of my own sanity I will let that idea go thanks! I'll settle with being able to just talk to him without looking at my watch every few minutes.