Originally Posted by blueboy:
“Virgin Media had a severe outage this week too. It can happen to any company. I love Skype, its my choice and has never once let me down. I use the skypephone from 3 so i am mobile and have an always on connection to Skype. Fantastic service and one many freinds, families and the many contacts i now have use mainly FREE.”
Yes outages can happen to any company, but Skype have been particularly bad at providing services. You quote Virgin's outage, which lasted several hours and only affected parts of their network. Skype went down for DAYS in August and affected ALL of its network. They also had problems calling PSTN customers for almost a week back in April, and this is supposed to be an established stable company. Additionally, some customers with certain 020 numbers had to change them since they failed to negotiate renewing their lease, meaning up to 10,000 customers have to change their numbers!
The truth is Skype is really playing at being a VOIP provider. Their traffic works on a P2P basis so relies on calls being able to be distributed across its user base. There is no direct connection with their server unless you want to call a PSTN number. This all means under-investment in their own equipment leading to sub-standard services.
The 3/Skype spin is very clever. You're not actually using Skype between your handset and 3 at all, you're actually using a normal mobile line. Skype and 3 went into a lucrative deal to market this, but the best thing about it is 3 can give you a service that you believe is cheaper, when in actualities you're being charged similar amounts as before except this time 3 won't give you any assurances over quality of services.
Given the proven unreliability of Skype, its increased costs above most other providers on calls, their charges for extras that others provide for free as standard (such as a geographical incoming line), and their under-investment on their own network since they rely on sharing calls on everyone with the software installed (remember that if you're being traffic shaped, Skype uses your connection whether you're making a call or not); I'd sooner go for any other proper SIP-based provider before buying into the Skype hype any time.
