What’s Up With Skype?
January 4th, 2007 Posted in VOIP Services, Competition
What’s happened to Skype recently? When I call someone, they frequently can’t hear me or the call drops and then goes live again, or it drops completely. All the people who have experienced the same problems use a high-speed cable connection. Is that the problem or is there too much traffic on the network or does the latest version of Skype has a bug? It’s so frustrating that I’m double-guessing my recent decision to buy the North American all-you-can-eat long-distance plan.
January 4th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
I have found it completely unusable to mobiles and any calls not to major centres (not Skype specific, other VoIP services seem to have similar problems). Skype to Skype is perfect every time, but anything off their P2P is really hit and miss. I think this is a reflection of the termination providers and latency; which can be managed on the Skype network but not on a SIP termination node, rather than the Skype software itself.
January 4th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
I would guess that it’s probably a Rogers or Bell issue, depending on your provider, and that they are likely engaging in “bandwidth shaping” in ways that make it harder for P2P services like Skype to function properly.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
I’ve had similar problems with Rogers. They seem to be doing something strange. My Vonage through Rogers also had problems. If you read some of the forums everyone is complaining since they launched their Home phone service.
I recently signed up for a DSL service with a third-party ( not Bell directly ) and its working alot better with Skype.
January 5th, 2007 at 5:17 am
I also believe it to be a high speed cable issue. So far Bell has not seemed interested in stoping Ip phone services on its lines. Whereas Videotron here in Montréal certainly would like users to only use its service and probably will start bandwidth shaping soon.
January 6th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Have you taken a look at damaka? Its quality is awesome plus it has some really nice and useful features…
check them out: http://www.damaka.com
January 6th, 2007 at 7:21 am
The last time I used Skype to call a landline (about two weeks ago), it was crystal clear. We were impressed that it was even better quality than a cell phone call. Of course, I wonder if it will be as good all the time but for the per minute charges, it’s pretty darn good!
January 8th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
I haven’t noticed any major quality issues on P2P calls to Europe or China lately. Calls to landlines or mobiles continue to be a “hit or miss” affair, and sometimes require a couple of tries until the sound is clear.
January 9th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
I’ve noticed the same. It’s not too bad when I’m using it from the office, but it’s becoming bloody awful at home (which really sucks, as I just signed up for the one-off unlimited calls package they were running as a special before Christmas).
This leads me to suspect that the problem has more to do with the ISP than the Skype service itself, which could well mean that it’s some “bandwidth shaping” skulduggery from my home service provider. I suspect they’d much rather I switched to their VoIP service than use Skype. Swines.