When bad software is an advantage

Hello, friends!

My girlfriend and I one day decided we wanted to see each other besides just chatting. Unfortunately, taking a plane every weekend is kind of outside our budget, go figure...
We both use free software, so after trying different clients we settled for amsn to cam. Why go for a proprietary network? Simple: both my girlfriend and I have horrible connections; the cam implementation in the Windows Live Messenger network is just horrible, it goes frame-by-frame. Luckily, this was an advantage for us, because we wouldn't be transmitting or receiving as much data and it wouldn't make our connections choke. Seeing each other frame-by-frame was better than not seeing each other.

Jabber/XMPP works like a charm, really smooth and everything... on a normal connection. For us it gets all pixelized fast.

Unfortunately, Microsoft changed the protocol for their cam exchange in Windows Live Messenger, so we have to wait until the new version of amsn comes out.

In the meantime, I'm using VLC to stream to her. At least she can see me!

Do you guys have any suggestion on what to try? Only free software, please (ie, not Skype because it's proprietary). I was going to try SIP with Ekiga / Qutecom, anybody has a good / bad experience with that?