How can I explain SKYPE to my class of 7 year olds?
Skype is a company that offers VOIP, or voice over Internet Protocol. Basically, this just means telephone service over the Internet. Your computer changes the sound from your microphone into a digital signal, or a series of 1s and 0s. Once it’s encoded into 1s and 0s, the sound can be stored as a file on the computer, like an mp3 file, or transferred over the Internet to another computer, where it can be changed back to sound. What Skype does is set up this file transfer to act like a regular telephone conversation. The sound encoding and decoding happen quickly enough that you can have a conversation with another computer user almost instantly, and it appears to be as fast as a regular phone call. For a fee, Skype will even connect your phone call to a regular phone. It does this by having phone lines in enough areas that every long distance call gets transfered to a local exchange so that the call is charged by the phone company as a local call. Skype can then charge you less than t
