The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Once it is all setup, check that it has registered with the providers. Open up Edit, Accounts and check the status. Both of mine, Ekiga.net and Ekiga Call Out, say they're Registered. Now we are ready to rock and roll!
If you want to call an Ekiga user, after the sip: enter in
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and hit Enter or the green calling icon. Wait a few seconds for it to connect and have a chat with them!
If you want to call a normal phone, after the sip: enter in the phone number in International format, so calling an Australian mobile number would be sip:
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. The @sip.diamondcard.us is important as it makes sure that the call is routed through DiamondCard's system.
The next "gotcha" for me was to work out how to send SMSs. This proved to be quite difficult and involved a lot of reading a lot of documentation, most of which wasn't relevant to the version I was using. However, in the end the solution was remarkably simple.
It seems that there's no other way of doing this, so make a new contact (Chat, Add contact). Put in the phone number in the ever-present International format. Remember the @sip.diamondcard.us. Give the contact a meaningful name and select a category for them.
Back in the main window, right-click on the contact and select Message. At the bottom of the chat window, type your SMS and then hit Enter. If you don't see an error message, then it has been successful. You can also track your SMS's progress (and see what you wrote too) through the DiamondCard website.
That's pretty much it for the basics. And I can now ditch Skype on Ubuntu!
DiamondCard and Ekiga offer a lot more than just this, such as the ability to purchase incoming phone numbers (however, I found that these were limited to Sydney in Australia), but I will let you figure out the other features.
Post Script: When researching this article, I came across the Skype for MID beta. Whilst not directly targeted for Linux PCs, it does work. The version number 3.0.0.93 indicates it is based on version 3 of the Windows client, so still doesn't have 100% of the functionality of the current Windows client.
However, it does offer a different and more useful GUI and you can SMS with it. It is beta software and there is no installer. You download the tar file, extract it, double-click on the skype executable and select Run.
So, while Skype are kind-of getting there with the MID client, I won't be holding my breath for that functionality in the actual Linux client.
David Bass
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