your call cannot be completed…
Like so many others with friends and relatives in the London area I called my brother early yesterday morning.

On my first attempt I got a message that my call could not be completed. On two subsequent attempts over the next ten minutes I got no message or sound at all.

I suppose this was because of the heavy phone traffic as everyone on the Eastern Seabord woke up to the news of the London bombings and picked up their phones at about the same time.

SkypeOut connects when the phones fail
I have subscribed to Skype’s SkypeOut service which connects PC users to the regular phone system. So at this point I booted my laptop, put on my headset, and dialed as soon as Skype showed me online.

Immediately the phone rang at the other end and I was connected to the London phone I was calling.

I believe this worked where the phone system failed because Skype crosses the Atlantic via the Internet, bypassing the North American phone system and connected directly into the local system at the London end, which was not experiencing any problems.

It would be interesting to know if this would have been the same with the VoIP services that provide local phone service. That may be the case if they also bypass the North American telephone switches.

In speaking with others I found that some had experienced the same failure of the phone service while others had not.

Anyway, I was glad to have an alternative.