skype

Vanity Fair 5: VOIP

~ Adil Hasan ~ Leave a comment

VOIP stands for Voice over IP is a method of voice or multimedia communication over the internet. It is quite frequently used in this digital age with lots of applications being developed to do it such as Skype and We Chat.

We Chat is mobile application widely used by Chinese people since most of the other social networking and VOIP platforms are banned in China. I actually started using We Chat last year when I came to Melbourne since there is such a large number of Chinese people in my course and also in Melbourne in general. We actually have a group on We Chat with all the people in it for our course.

As far as the CMWP digital story group is concerned, we’re only two people so there was no conference call. Just a two way phone call over We Chat a couple of times (for the sake of this task). To be honest, I actually preferred calling my group mate on her phone number directly. I’ll list down the strengths and weaknesses (for me) and the reason will be clear.

Strengths:

  1. Free of cost (if you have WiFi/data.
  2. You can even have Video calls/conference.
  3. Option of sending quick voice notes.
  4. Great if there’s several people who want to communicate through VOIP.

Weaknesses:

  1. The need of WiFi/data to operate.
  2. Need the other person to be connected to the net as well.
  3. If the connection is not good, the voice is not clear and gets distorted/delayed.
  4. Other person needs to have We Chat as well (apart from Chinese people, other people hardly use it).
  5. Not as quick as a phone call.
  6. I have a free local calls package so I don’t really feel the need to use any VOIP app to call someone. It would’ve been useful if I was calling someone internationally.

 

So, to sum it up, we didn’t really feel the need to use We Chat to call each other because it was not as quick or reliable as phone calls. This doesn’t mean that We Chat is not good. It is indeed a very useful app. You can do so much with it. It even has moments (something like FB timelines) and video recording ability but as far as connecting with my group mate for the digital story goes, it wasn’t much of a help for me since I had better options.