There's a lot of hype these days surrounding Internet-based voice communications (VoIP) replacing traditional telephone service. Most of this revolves around companies such as Vonage who coin themselves as 'Broadband Phone Company'. So what about those of us who don't have a broadband connection? Just because you don't have high speed Internet, doesn't mean that you can't save a fortune by using VoIP for your long-distance calls. Whilst a broadband connection will usually result in more consistent VoIP call quality, comparable results can be achieved using a dial-up connection provided some simple guidelines are followed.

Shop Around

Not all VoIP service providers support dial-up users. Companies such as Vonage bill themselves as alternatives to traditional telephone service and shy away from dial-up community (who are tied to those 'traditional' networks to access Internet). Furthermore, some service providers only support dial-up above a certain speed (e.g., 56Kbp). Two companies whose VoIP softphone applications work well over low speed connections include Callserve and Go2Call.

'Free-up' your System Resources

In order to ensure highest call quality, close programs that are running in 'background'. For Windows users, these applications can be seen in taskbar at bottom right of your screen. 'Right-click' icons and close those programs that aren't critical to system security (e.g., don't close anti-virus software, firewall applications and like).

I spend many hours a week reviewing submissions submitted to my site and cannot believe that lack of effort put in to product descriptions by some authors when they are making their PAD files. You would be surprised at all one and 2 sentence product descriptions with misspellings and grammar errors that I have come across.

I realize that many shareware authors are from non-English speaking countries and do not have a good knowledge of English language but if you decide that you wish to market your products to English websites it would be a good idea to have someone with a knowledge of English to proofread your descriptions. Many visitors to download sites will click right out of your product page if they cannot understand your descriptions or find too many grammar and spelling errors.