Monday, October 1, 2007

What's going on with Skype?

Anyone noticed a quality drop in Skype? We've been using Skype quite a bit and it seems that something's changing. Perhaps the load of all users overloads their systems?
Here's some of what I'm seeing:
  • After 10 minutes or so of a call the quality would drop into shuttered fragments of voice
  • It seems Skype implemented a new algorithm that tries to repair the lost voice frames, so there's a long gap and then the other side is heard in fast-forward mode, making it impossible to understand. That's useless. get it right the first time and if you can't, drop it (and drop this business)
  • On a number of PCs, I've seen that sometimes Skype loads the processor to 98% and stays there. The PC then starts to crawl in a very visible way. I had to restart it
  • On some days calls come in but are only displayed for a fraction of a second before a call disconnects (I know, nobody wants to talk to me)
Hey skype folks, you were good so far and I've been loyal...get back in shape, please.

1 comment:

Jason Garbis said...

I haven't used Skype for voice very much recently, so I can't comment on any drop in quality.

But, this may well be due to the acquisition of Skype by eBay. Perhaps some of the key, core developers have cashed out and moved on?

Certainly some of this loss of momentum is apparent in eBay's massive writedown of Skype's acquisition cost this week...