A few years ago, I tried Skype and the experience was terrible. The voice quality was dreadful and the connection constantly failed. People now tell me Skype has changed. Is it really better? Will it save me money? Is it safe? Joanna, Wan Chai DQ: In the past, I would have agreed with you about Skype. But a little over a year ago, a good friend moved back to Britain and asked me to try the peer-to-peer internet telephony service again. I was surprised to find it worked wonderfully - most of the time. Skype can actually rival the voice quality of standard telephone lines, bar a few problems such as internet traffic. Conference calls are extremely easy to set up, even using video. I have used it on Windows and Mac, but it also works on Linux. Add-ons for Skype have started to become available. Recording conversations, for example, is an excellent business application if you need to keep records. There continues to be plenty of debate about Skype's security. Its software does encrypt calls and I have not heard of anybody's conversation being hacked - yet. Skype, which offers both free and paid services, can help you save money, provided you have the necessary connection speed. That's an important proviso. I have experienced some dreadful connections when the transmission is slow. However, Skype is getting bigger and that creates scalability issues. If making free calls over the internet does not work for you, pick up your phone. Traditional telecommunications carriers, such as BT, and new internet-based specialists, such as Hong Kong Broadband, are taking online voice services seriously, so check out what they have to offer. Can I send text messages via the internet to any mobile phone in the world? Will this cost a lot of money or can I do it for free? Name and address supplied DQ: If you do a Google search on 'free SMS' you will get too many hits to make sense of the results. I visited several sites that declared: 'Send SMS anywhere in the world for FREE!' Unfortunately, even the most cursory look showed the words 'free' and 'world' were not being used in the traditional sense. Some sites will provide you with a free service for a short time then start imposing charges. Other sites will restrict the service to a geographical region. If any readers have experience with these services, DQ wants to hear from them.