I will need Skype when I fly to the USA. The place I am staying only has a normal landline telephone, no hi-speed internet or anything like that. To get into internet, I normally take out a subscription to Earthlink for one month and then take the phone plug out of the phone and put it in my computer. Will Skype work on a normal landline phone when I hook it up to Internet as I described? If yes, will only the voice connection work or also the camera?

It'll probably work but the quality will be very poor, as the bandwidth is far lower than you'd get on broadband. I expect sound will work okay with some dropped sound, and the video to not work at all. YMMV.

It might sound odd that a phone line which is perfectly capable of carrying a good voice conversation by itself won't do equally well with Skype. The problem is in how the Internet works. It breaks up messages into chunks called "packets." Each packet carries a fraction of a second's worth of sound. Each packet gets a number and is transmitted independently of all the others, using a different path, taking a different time and potentially being retransmitted a different number of times due to transmission errors. When they get to the other end, the receiving computer uses their numbers to reassemble them. This works fine for, say, an e-mail message, since nobody cares what order the bits show up in or if it takes an extra half second to get there, as long as it's all reassembled correctly at the end of the day. With voice conversations, though, this process can really do a number on quality. The way Skype (and others like it) normally avoid these problems is by using lines that are so fast that the problems are fixed - all the packets arrive, they're sorted into the correct order, all the retransmissions are done - before a person can tell there were any. Over a slow line, this doesn't happen.

I wouldn't expect much of the camera, as video sends more data than voice. Be prepared to turn it off. If you leave it on, trying to send video will just drain bandwidth from the voice side.

Years ago, when it was still usual to grab a phone line from the jack in the lounges I was able to use skype and quality was incredibly good. Believe it requires a minimum of 36 or 48k, which is pretty low.

But you ought to have skype only when placing a phone call; Forget cams, downloading music/movies/p2p or anything else in the background.

OK, thanks everyone for all the advice!

Get a local US Skype To Go number. http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/feat...e-to-go-number

Its basically the modern calling card.