WHEN VOIP OUTFIT SKYPE launched on the scene it was a brave new world boasting Internet voice calling goodness that would free man plus dog from the shackles of telcos everywhere. But it seems that with more than 12 million subscribers the system is getting stretched to capacity.Once limited only by technology, the Skype network has developed into a two-tier organisation. On one hand there is the paid-for all singing and dancing phone system and the other is the red-headed step child, the free PC to PC system, which now comes with video.
However it is hard to find a user who is satisfied with the free service these days. Anyone who tries to use it for anything more than a glorified messaging service, or making a billed phone call, is suffering.
The most common complaint is with dropped calls, particularly on the video chat. The problem is that a call will often stay dropped for some minutes. The problem appears to be getting worse over the last three months for Blighty users and appears to be traffic related. You are less likely to be dropped using Skype if you are trying to run it at 3am on a weekday than you are at about 7pm.
It seems that the paid-for landline phone line calls are less effected and no one has reported a disconnection, although quality is sometimes hairier than a Dulux dog with extensions.
We decided to see if we could improve things with the Skype 4.0 Beta which has been out since June. Director of Windows Product Management at Skype, Mike Bartlett promised that video was a much-loved feature in Skype 4.0.
Skype is claiming it has use its data-compression techniques to enable high-quality voice conversations with 2Kb per second bandwidth, and video on 6Kb per second, so any problems with traffic should be reduced dramatically.
The first thing you notice is that Skype stops being a fairly discreet system of windows that you can shift around your screen, to one big screen -hogging application that you are expected to manoeuvre between conversations by clicking a button.Even before we had the chance to test call quality, we found that this was damn annoying.
However it was time to test call quality in test calls to America, Bulgaria, Italy and around the corner. The American call was to an Apple PC so we didn’t hold out much hope here and we were not disappointed. The OSX version of the software is a bit behind the rest of the world when it comes to Skype and, sure enough, we experienced dropped calls and lock-outs on both sides of the pond. Bulgaria and Italy had the same thing even on voice-only calls, so this software was rapidly heading toward ‘chocolate teapot’ status.
Right it should manage a local British call, right? Er… no. They dropped at the same speed as the others.
So that was on the latest Vista laptop. We tried to do the same thing with the same software on Windows XP on a desktop to check that it was not some incorrect settings we had and it also went tits up. What was surprising was the paid-for phone to landline service worked fine, which seems to suggest that Skype knows where its revenue stream is coming from.
We asked Skype for a comment on our findings. We even gave them our Skype number. They didn’t get back to us before deadline.
Perhaps it dropped its connection. µ
