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Last year, my wife and I wanted to get away to celebrate our wedding anniversary in Europe. Getting away from home when it's not holiday season, and you're a one person business is no easy feat. Of course I took my laptop and could maintain email contact with clients, but sometimes email isn't enough, and what about those people who don't know you're away, or just prefer phoning anyway?

Enter Skype ( www.skype.com ). For those who've been living under a rock for the last few years, Skype is a free program that lets you make voice and video calls and send instant messages for free between devices with the program installed. Notice I say devices, not PCs, as it's available for iPhones, Macs, Linux, and even some dedicated Skype handsets. So far, apart from the wide device support, so what? It doesn't sound that different to so many other instant messenging programs out there?

Where Skype excels is once you start adding paid services. While money is involved, it's absurdly cheap compared to traditional phone charges.

Back to my situation. I needed to be contactable while I was away overseas, but I couldn't assume people would email, and I didn't want to pay the ridiculous roaming charges associated with receiving calls on my cell phone.

I already had call diversion with my fixed line account here, as when I'm out of the office, I divert calls to my cell phone. Both Telecom and Vodafone offer packages where you can pay a fixed amount for unlimited calling to a designated cell phone as long as your land line and mobile are on the same network. In this case, diverting to my cell phone wouldn't help due to roaming charges already mentioned.

Fortunately, Skype offers a service called Skype In, which allows you to rent a 'land line' number that people can call with normal phones which will actually call through to your Skype. If you happen to be offline, then there's a voicemail service included. In NZ Skype In numbers are available for Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. In my case I was outside these regions, so in the end I settled for a Christchurch number as I was in the South Island. I set up my call diversion at home to divert to this number - It would cost me a national call every time someone called home, but this was a price I was prepared to pay to stay in touch with clients.