I haven't tried this yet - I'm more curious than anything else as to your opinions.

I use Ventrilo (a VOIP utility) for gaming quite a bit and I never seem to get the voice glitches that Skype & Live Messenger seem to get. It's low on CPU (important when gaming) and high on sound quality – a pretty good mix in my book.

Since I regularly have up to 6 way conversations with it, I was then wondering how well it might work for remote software development teams. I can imagine an arrangement where everyone would run Ventrilo during the day and could chat with the rest of the team at any time they needed. They could also use the push-to-talk feature so that background noise wouldn’t be coming through all day long, and because it's so low on CPU usage it wouldn't affect the all important activity of software compilation :-)

So, do you think it would create a better sense of connectedness between team members? Do you already do something like this in your remote teams? Or am I just day dreaming here?

Opinions welcome.